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Improving Gamification By Leveraging Endogenous Value, Brennan Laurence Smith

Theses and Dissertations

"Gamification" is the application of game design principles to non-game contexts, such as education, personal fitness, etc. Gamification's intent is to incentivize unpalatable tasks. Current gamification efforts in the industry use some features traditionally associated with games, but fail to use game design principles as defined by the games industry. One such principle is endogenous rewards for task completion. We propose that endogenous rewards will increase the efficacy of gamification by increasing user engagement and retention. To demonstrate, we create a gamification framework where the rewards for completing real-life tasks are items with high endogenous value in the game, incentivizing …