Personalized Gaming for Motivating Social and Behavioral Science Participation

Game-like environments are increasingly used for conducting research due to the affordances that such environments offer. However, the problem remains that such environments treat their users equally. In order to address this, personalization is necessary. In this paper we discuss the need to personalize gamified research environments to motivate participation by illustrating a playful platform called Mad Science, which is being developed to allow users to create social and behavioral studies. This discussion is both informed by the platform's affordances and use thus far as well as existing theories on player motivation, and contributes to theory-informed approaches to (gamified) personalization technologies.