Towards engineering future gameful applications

Gamification is the exploitation of game mechanisms for serious applications. In general they target societal challenges by engaging people in game-like scenarios. These mechanisms are so successful that there exists a growing interest in exploiting gamification in other scenarios where in general the fundamental need is enhancing people self-motivation. Notably, a major engagement could be necessary for students attending courses, employees with decreasing enthusiasm for their work, users lacking interest for certain applications, and so forth. In this respect, even though there exist disparate solutions to create gameful applications, they are intended to be built from scratch and stand-alone. This paper instead proposes a line of research, in the software engineering field by which gameful mechanisms can be bound to existing software applications to create gamified scenarios. In this way, potential adopters are only required to define the game elements and how they should be combined, while the remaining game automation part is obtained for free. Interestingly, this approach not only simplifies the adoption of gamification elements in pre-existing applications, but it also discloses the opportunity of enhancing the engineering of gameful applications as well as the management of the combination of multiple games.