Entertainment for Serious Purposes: Customization of the Gamification Process

The gamification process is gaining increasing interest in many different environments such as education, business, tourism, smart-cities management. In literature, many studies proposed approaches to transform a non-game activity into a game, but these methods are often too general to be effective (e.g., simple rules, incentive mechanisms such as scores or vague prizes). In a society where algorithms personalize everything, from search engine results, to news on social networks, it is anachronistic to think of a single gamification strategy suited to different categories of people (e.g., what might be motivating for digital natives, might not be for digital immigrants, and vice versa). In this paper, through a questionnaire filled by 226 people, we show that the game preferences (rules, mechanics, focus, motivations, and gaming environment) are age-dependent. These preferences can be used to customize the gamification process and therefore the study might be helpful to develop effective gamification strategies.