System Thinking in Gamification

Abstract People spend a lot of time and energy playing videogames (Kapp in The gamification of learning and instruction: game-based methods and strategies for training and education. Pfeiffer an imprint of Wiley, San Francisco, 2012), and as a result, gamification has grown from a buzzword into a discipline. Since 2012, the authors have experimented with system thinking as a methodology for developing gamification and will present examples in this article. The primary objectives are to study how system thinking can be used to understand, design, develop and document gamifications, and how psychology and pedagogics can be integrated in the process to enhance the learning. This is an observational case study that gives examples of how students (i) use system thinking to understand and clarify the gamification case using system analysis and (ii) use system dynamics to simulate cases and predict user responses. Students begin system analysis once the gamification idea is developed and their goals and the case parameters are established, and it includes making casual loop diagrams, flow charts, and reference behavior patterns. Students then find and experiment with numerical data for the case and use system dynamics to simulate the gamification and predict the user results. The pedagogy is problem based and grounded in traditional problem-based learning and situated learning. This article shows how system thinking allows students and professionals to develop a deeper and more tangible understanding of the research materials and presumptions they have when engaging in any given gamification scenario. System thinking also provides tools to test research material and hypotheses in a more structured, manageable, and palpable way. Although we have discovered several ways system thinking can benefit gamification design, the research has also revealed new areas where system thinking could be explored further.