Exploiting Multi-Level Modelling for Designing and Deploying Gameful Systems

Gamification is increasingly used to build solutions for driving the behaviour of target users' populations. Gameful systems are typically exploited to keep users' involvement in certain activities and/or to modify an initial behaviour through game-like elements, such as awarding points, submitting challenges and/or fostering competition and cooperation with other players. Gamification mechanisms are well-defined and composed of different ingredients that have to be correctly amalgamated together; among these we find single/multi-player challenges targeted to reach a certain goal and providing an adequate award for compensation. Since the current approaches are largely based on hand-coding/tuning, when the game grows in its complexity, keeping track of all the mechanisms and maintaining the implementation can become error-prone and tedious activities. In this paper, we describe a multi-level modelling approach for the definition of gamification mechanisms, from their design to their deployment and runtime adaptation. The approach is implemented by means of JetBrains MPS, a text-based meta-modelling framework, and validated using two gameful systems in the Education and Mobility domains.