Gamifying Good Deeds: User Experience, Agency, and Values in Play During a Descriptathon

Abstract

Purpose: This study compares value expressions of intervention designers and participants in a hackathon-like event to research relationships between values and gamification techniques. Our research identifies and analyzes value expressions during a large-scale intervention at national parks for social inclusion of people who are blind or have low vision. Researchers and organizations can use our model to create common- ground opportunities within values-sensitive gamified designs. Method: We collected qualitative and quantitative data via multiple methods and from different perspectives to strengthen validity and better determine what stakeholders wanted from the gamified experience. For methods—a pre-survey, a list of intervention activities, and a post-survey—we analyzed discourse and coded for values; then we compared data across sets to evaluate values and their alignment/misalignment among intervention designers and participants. Results: Without clear and focused attention to values, designers and participants can experience underlying, unintended, and unnecessary friction. Conclusion: Of the many ways to conceptualize and perform a socially just intervention, this research illustrates the worth of explicitly identifying values on the front end of the design intervention process and actively designing those values into the organizational aspects of the intervention. A design model like ours serves as a subtextual glue to keep people working together. The model also undergirds these complementary value systems, as they interact and combine to contribute to a cause.