Generating Personalized Challenges to Enhance the Persuasive Power of Gamification

While gamification is often effective in incentivizing behavioral changes, well-known limitations concern retaining the interest of players over the long term, and sustaining the new behaviors promoted through the game. To make the gamification user experience more varied and compelling, we propose an approach based on the Procedural Content Generation of personalized and contextualized playable units that appeal individually to each player. We have implemented this approach as a system that generates and recommends personalized challenges, based on the player’s preference, history, game state and performance, and we have evaluated it using a smart urban mobility game that proposed weekly challenges to hundreds of citizens/players.