Special Section on Gamification and Software Engineering
Fabiano Dalpiaz, Raian Ali, Sjaak Brinkkemper · Information and Software Technology · 2018
Special Section on Gamification and Software EngineeringGamification concerns the use of game elements and mechanics in non-gaming contexts.Gamification has been successfully applied to boost certain behaviors and attitudes in many fields including education, healthcare, marketing, management, and recruitment.This theme section is motivated by the observation that the current literature provides little knowledge on the relationship between gamification and software engineering.The call for papers was devised to accommodate two main themes: (i) gamification for software engineering: how can gamification be employed to foster engagement and performance in software engineering?; and (ii) software engineering for gamification: how can the software engineering discipline contribute towards a systematic, and effective, development of gamification applications?There was a very positive response to the call: circa 30 prospective authors contacted us and communicated their intention to submit a paper by sharing a tentative abstract.We discussed thoroughly each case to ensure fitness to scope, and this eventually resulted in a total of 16 within-scope papers which then went through the peer review process.At the end of the process, four papers were accepted to this theme section, while the other 12 were rejected.Most of the non-accepted papers were of good quality, but many had a generic treatment of gamification or did not address the specifics of software engineering.The submitted papers have multidisciplinary foundations, including psychology and economics concepts in relation to perception, behavior, personality, behavior economics and group dynamics.In addition, the papers generally presented an amalgamation between the classic software engineering techniques and activities on one hand, and usability and HCI concepts on the other hand.This reflects well the human-intense nature of gamification and the role of users, better named as subjects, in its acceptance and effectiveness.