Defining gamification: a service marketing perspective

During recent years "gamification" has gained significant attention among practitioners and game scholars. However, the current understanding of gamification has been solely based on the act of adding systemic game elements into services. In this paper, we propose a new definition for gamification, which emphases the experiential nature of games and gamification, instead of the systemic understanding. Furthermore, we tie this definition to theory from service marketing because majority of gamification implementations aim towards goals of marketing, which brings to the discussion the notion of how customer / user is always ultimately the creator of value. Since now, the main venue for academic discussion on gamification has mainly been the HCI community. We find it relevant both for industry practitioners as well as for academics to study how gamification can fit in the body of knowledge of existing service literature because the goals and the means of gamification and marketing have a significant overlap.