A User Perspective On Transformative Gamification Services

The concept of transformative gamification is a new concept emerging from the dual paradigms of gamification and transformative services research (TSR). This concept was first introduced by Tanouri et al. (2019) and defined as games which focus on creating and maintaining uplifting changes in consumers’ performances of health and well-being behaviours. It was then further investigated in other studies focusing on conceptualising this concept and different types of values transformative gamification services can provide for their users (Mulcahy et al., 2020; Tanouri et al., 2021).

Although previous studies significantly further the understanding of transformative gamification services and their position among other types of gamification and serious games, there seems to be a lack of research with regards to investigation of this concept from the users’ perspective. This is particularly important since value co-creation and users’ input are heavily emphasised in TSR (Anderson & Ostrom, 2015; Russell-Bennett et al., 2019) – which is the back bone of transformative gamification.

As such the aim of this study is to investigate the concept of transformative gamification from the users’ perspective and understand what are the ingredients of a transformative gamification service from the perspective of the potential users. Doing so, this research focuses on addressing the below research question:

RQ: What are the main components of transformative gamification from perspective of potential end users.