“Gamification For All”: planning and designing a community-oriented gamification strategy

Abstract

Lurkers are a group of users who barely post and tend to represent a large percentage of the users of online communities. Although this problem has been quite acknowledged in literature, the use of gamified strategies to encourage users’ participation in online communities has been poorly understood. The purpose of this paper is to report on a gamification strategy implemented in a multi-tenant architecture to impact the users’ frequency to generate community activities. A Development Research method was adopted, which embodied the analysis of previous studies on gamified online communities; development of the gamified strategy for the miOne online community (https://mione.altice.pt) that is built under a multi-tenant environment, and its evaluation with the target audience. Results suggest that the gamification elements that can foster community engagement are the option of scaffolding in a levels’ narrative and progress in missions, allowing players to autonomously explore the online community.