Increasing motivation in social exercise games: personalising gamification elements to player type

ABSTRACT

Fun and social affiliation are good predictors of long-term intention to use game-based interventions including those for motivating physical activity, yet current player matching algorithms are poor at facilitating social connectedness. In this paper, we report on the results of a study investigating how different player traits are associated with interest in social features of an exercise game for improving player experience through better player matching using common and complementary characteristics. Twelve conceptual scenarios were illustrated using storyboards and data was collected from 196 respondents who rated their attitudes and preferences towards gamification elements. Correlational results showed that all scenarios, except for cutting corners, were perceived as persuasive, enjoyable, engaging and are likely to increase future exercise intention for players who score high on Philanthropist- and Socialiser-oriented traits. Results also showed that many players favour the altruistic donation feature. Furthermore, qualitative results underscore that it is the player's partner that matters more than the players’ personalities. We conclude with practical recommendations for designing more personalised exercise games that can include more socially engaging game mechanics in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Social exergames
• gamification
• group play
• player matching
• player type
• personalisation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants who kindly participated in the user studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Exergames are also commonly referred to as active video games (Altamimi & Skinner, 2012), active gaming (Lieberman et al., 2011), motion-based games for health (Caro et al., 2018; Malaka et al., 2016) or exertion games (W. Choi et al., 2016; Mueller et al., 2011), in which interaction of the interface and gameplay requires physical effort.

2 Storyboards were created using Storyboard That (https://www.storyboardthat.com/).

3 Also commonly referred to as ‘gameful elements’ in the game user research literature (Altmeyer et al., 2019, 2021; Tondello et al., 2017).

4 All created storyboards: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5xy9pqp7zkznhw1/AABXgP15zo9uzTFN4qdAj3iia?dl=0

5 Amazon MTurk (https://www.mturk.com/).

6 Qualtrics (https://www.qualtrics.com/).

7 Miro (https://miro.com/).