How is Purposeful Gaming an Information System Research Topic?

Before I get into today's post just a little bit of background. This month I will have written three papers on gamification in two months. Wow! I did not think that I would be able to do so much but once you work on a topic that you truly enjoy it is really amazing what you can accomplish. Whenever I sat down to write something it was difficult to pull away from the screen. In fact, a paper that I thought would take a month to write was finished in a week. It doesn't feel like research when you are having this much fun, amirite?

Anyways on to the post. What I am proposing is the foundation for purposeful games research in the information systems (IS) field. Ambitious? You bet, but necessary. For whatever reason, the Information System research community has only focused on gamification as a pedagogical tool. However the use of information systems is prevalent for gamified applications. Purposeful games would be harder to implement without using information systems. Therefore our discipline has something more to contribute to this field than being just another domain for using games. But we can't just hope it falls into our laps; we are going to have to go out there and take it for ourselves.

So enough of the soapbox ranting. There are three major areas where research into information systems can lead to worthwhile results for purposeful games and vice versa: Specific business applications, information system development, and information system theories.

Purposeful games are already changing the way that employees interact with existing business applications. For example, one of the most notorious business systems out there is an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. They are difficult to implement, expensive, and touch every part of the business. Therefore employees are forced to work with a system that they probably hate. So now people are being trained in game-like scenarios to use the system. The software becomes a part of a game. Also developers working on marketing IS, like websites and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, will be told to incorporate game-like features into these business systems. How will they do this without simply "PUTTING POINTS ON IT!"?  What is the best way to "gamify" these applications? These are great questions for research and are dependent on understanding how these applications function in the first place. And I cannot think of another discipline that has spilled so much digital ink on topics such as, ERP implementation, as the IS field.

Information system development is the other field that purposeful games can be informed by and inform. Information systems field has a whole research area dedicated to understanding how IS can work in a particular domain and supporting the people who design these systems. This includes not only choosing the right features for the application but also the management of the project and analysis of the context that the application will be implemented. If purposeful games are being implemented through information systems then how should the information systems be implemented to best fit the game? Also games may have certain features and design choices that benefit real-world business applications. Millions of people have used World of Warcraft's auction house interface to buy and sell virtual goods without any problems. Why not implement the exact same interface for real world goods?

The last area where information systems research and purposeful games intersect is the IS adoption/use theories. A large part of the theoretical background of the IS field is built on explaining why people use certain systems and how we can get people to use them more. Purposeful gaming is  specifically about changing people's behaviour. However games include concepts that have been deemed as unnecessary or secondary for business applications. For instance, internal motivation and "fun" are assumed to not be part of IS use and adoption. However the use of purposeful games flies in the face of that assumption. Now IS researchers will have to think about what "fun" means, how IS can implement it, and how it affects IS use and adoption. 

 So that is all for today. Next time I will talk about "fun". How it is purposeful games' biggest hurdle, how it is a possible trap for managers, and why I keep putting quotes around it.