Towards Activity-Centered Gamification Design

Gamitication is increasingly advocated as a solution to motivational challenges across learning activities. However, given a particular learning activity, the question of how to choose relevant motivational affordances and how to incorporate them within the activity in order to evoke the desired motivational effect remains an open problem. To address this gap, we propose an activity-centered design framework for gamifying learning activities. The framework is driven by the motivational factors associated with the activity to be gamitied and implies identifying potential motivators and demotivators with the intent to guide the selection of relevant motivational affordances. The purpose is to enable a gameful experience by choosing motivational affordances that are in congruence with the motivators while curbing the effect of demotivators. The application of the framework is illustrated by a case study complemented by an empirical evaluation.