Studying Gamification as a Collaboration Motivator for Virtual Software Teams: Social Issues, Cultural Issues, and Research Methods

Gamification is the application of game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals. Motivation is an essential requirement for effective and efficient collaboration, which is particularly challenging when people work distributedly. In this paper, we discuss the topics of collaboration, motivation, and gamification in the context of software engineering. We then introduce our long-term research goal—building a theoretical framework that defines how gamification can be used as a collaboration motivator for virtual software teams. We also highlight the roles that social and cultural issues might play in understanding the phenomenon. Finally, we give an overview of our proposed research method to foster discussion during the workshop on how to best investigate the topic. Author