The use of gamification to increase the users’ empowerment in health-related behaviors
Résumé
Social marketing aims to affect users’ behaviors through various tools and one of these tools which is gamification has gained increasing attention in many behavior-changing programs. Gamification has been widely used, mainly to affect users’ levels of capabilities to address various issues in their lives. Gamification has been highlighted as an important tool to support users in developing, shaping, and altering their cognitive and behavioral skills. Although gamification has provided evidence in addressing different psychological, cognitive, and behavioral issues, such systems rely more on extrinsic motivations. Then, more research should be directed toward understanding how gamification and different gamified mechanics can fulfill the needs or intrinsic motivations, and empowerment, of users to affect their behaviors. This issue made us find out considering the relationship between gamification and empowerment, which brings novel thoughts to the field of gamification and changing behavior. This research has employed three gamified mechanics, which had been found in previous research and deployed them in our developed gamified application, Gametunut. Seven scenarios, in the form of experimentation, have been created based on the combinations of the three mechanics. We have run quantitative analysis in each of these scenarios and compared the results attained in each of them. 55 responses have been gathered in each of the scenarios (Ntotal = 385) and the results have been analyzed through SPSS and Smart PLS. The results showed that there is a positive and meaningful effect of gamified experience created by the different mechanics on empowerment. This study provides a number of theoretical and practical contributions that might help practitioners in marketing and business experts to design and have more effective gamified programs addressing users’ psychological and behavioral changing behaviors.