Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Sep 30, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 29, 2022 - Nov 24, 2022
Date Accepted: Aug 31, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A mathematical principle for the gamification of behavior change
ABSTRACT
Background:
Many people want to build good habits to become healthier, live longer, or become happier but struggle to change their behavior. Gamification can make behavior change easier by awarding points for the desired behavior and deducting points for its omission.
Objective:
Here, we introduce a principled mathematical method for determining how many points should be awarded/deducted for the enactment/omission of the desired behavior depending on when and how often the person has succeeded versus failed to enact it in the past. We call this approach optimal gamification of behavior change.
Methods:
As a proof of concept, we design a chatbot that applies our optimal gamification method to help people build a healthy water drinking habit. We evaluated the effectiveness of this gamified intervention in a 40-day long field experiment with two control groups that used the same chatbot without points and without feedback and reminders, respectively.
Results:
We found that, during the intervention, users who received feedback based on optimal gamification enacted the desired behavior more often than the active control group or the passive control group. After the intervention the experimental group enacted the desired behavior just as often as the two control groups.
Conclusions:
Our findings suggest that optimal gamification can be used to make digital behavior change interventions more effective.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.