Affective Effects of Gamification. Using Biosignals to Measure the Effects on Working and Learning Users Oliver Korn Affective & Cognitive Institute, Offenburg University Offenburg, Germany oliver.korn@acm.org Adrian Rees Affective & Cognitive Institute, Offenburg University Offenburg, Germany adrian.rees@hs-offenburg.de ABSTRACT What emotional effects does gamification have on users who work or learn with repetitive tasks? In this work, we use bio- signals to analyze these affective effects of gamification. Af- ter a brief discussion of related work, we describe the imple- mentation of an assistive system augmenting work by project- ing elements for guidance and gamification. We also show how this system can be extended to analyse users’ emotions. In a user study, we analyse both biosignals (facial expres- sions and electrodermal activity), and regular performance measures (error rate and task completion time). For the performance measures, the results confirm known ef- fects like increased speed and slightly increased error rate. In addition, the analysis of the biosignals provides strong evi- dence for two major affective effects: the gamification of work and learning tasks incites highly significantly more positive emotions and increases emotionality altogether. The results add to the design of assistive systems, which are aware of the physical as well as the affective context. CCS Concepts • Human-centered computing~Mixed / augmented reality • Human-centered computing~Empirical studies in HCI • Hu- man-centered computing~User centered design • Human-cen- tered computing~Contextual design • Human-centered compu- ting~User studies • Human-centered computing~Graphical user interfaces • Human-centered computing~Visualization • Social and professional topics~Socio-technical systems • Applied computing~Computer-assisted instruction Keywords Gamification; Affective Computing; Physiological Signals; Biosignals; Emotions; Affects; Playful Design INTRODUCTION This work attempts to validate the effects of the gamification of work and learning tasks using biosignals instead of classic surveys. On the application level, it contributes to the design of an assistive system, which is aware of both the physical and the affective context. Figure 1. Context- and emotion-aware interactive system. Figure 1 depicts the context- and emotion-aware interactive system. It projects elements for guidance as well as gamifi- cation directly into the workspace, supporting users in sce- narios with repetitive tasks: either tasks like manual assem- bly or learning tasks related to manual work, especially in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). As an example, acquiring skills like “soldering” involves re- peating physical tasks far more often, than understanding them cognitively would require. Here playful design can help a lot to increase motivation and work satisfaction. The combination of the areas work and learning (or compe- tence acquisition) is interesting: while playful design is rela- tively new to work contexts, it is common in education: in the nineties, multimedia-enriched lexica or vocabulary trainers were termed “edutainment”; subsequently, the term “serious games” replaced it. Today, the underlying design approach is generalized as gamification: “using video game elements to improve user experience and user engagement in non-game services and applications” [9]. The overall design of a system for smart and gamified assis- tance of work and physical learning tasks has already been described by Korn et al. [17,21]. That system already aimed to incorporate not only the physical context (hands, tools), but also the user’s emotions to detect stress and increase mo- tivation. However, to our knowledge such a system has not yet been implemented and evaluated in a user study. This is the focus of this work. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full cita- tion on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy other- wise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. PETRA '19, June 5–7, 2019, Rhodes, Greece © 2019 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6232-0/19/06…$15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3316782.3316783 1