Master Thesis ist172619

PLAN AND CALENDAR

I am currently enrolled on my last 2 non-thesis related courses. one of them is MCP - Multimedia Content Production. The other one is IVC - Interactive Visual Communication.

Apart from these 2, I am enrolled on the Master Project in Information and Software Engineering. For the next semester, the one missing will be the Master Thesis in Information and Software Engineering, where I will be able to submit the final thesis.

(Explain the Plan and Calendar)

WEEKLY LOGS

INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION

Introduction

With cities becoming more and more congested, there is a need to reduce the number of private cars driving on the road. For this, the solution is to maximise the potential for local public transport, by making it attractive, and a convenient alternative, but also by integrating the public transport system with people's lives, creating an appealing means of transportation, improving the urban environment.

According to Eurostat, more than 80\% of inland passenger transport in Europe is in passenger cars. Statistics confirm that, although public transport networks are efficient, and tend to become cleaner and more ecological, there still is a lack of interest in using them daily.
To be more specific, only 9.1\% of Europe is using the bus on regular usage. (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Passenger_transport_statistics)

The relative importance of passenger cars was highest in Portugal, in 2014, where people chose this means of transportation 89.4\%, while other member states vary between 80\% and 85\%, and some of them are even below the 67\% mark.
According to (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967070X07000820), should we understand Transport as a derived demand or as a valued activity?
The new paradigm regarding conventional transport analysis is "based on the premise that travel is a cost, and that travel times should be as short as possible. But this is changing as the new technology allows much greater travel time flexibility, including mobile working. It provides tremendous opportunity and choice in leisure activities, whether this means time spent online in the home, or taking the opportunity to book a last minute holiday overseas, or adapting existing activities (such as shopping)."
What this is confirming is that we can introduce new mechanisms to induce behavioural change in mobility, by creating engagement to this means of transportation, but also by developing secondary activities.
From 2010 onwards, there was a revolution in informatics, making technology cheaper and more user-friendly. It is common to have the transport network connected via GSM devices, sharing information that can be worked and delivered to the final user, or even to evaluate the current state of the system. When combined with mobile devices, these advanced are most valuable for the users, as they can schedule their lives knowing precisely at what time should they expect their transport. This adds value to the product, by keeping users informed at no cost, but also by making them adhere to the system.
The current mobile phone "fever" made everyone have its mobile phone. As such, there is a new standard where there are 2 to 3 operative systems around, and, while these might have several hardware combinations, they mostly share the same interfaces and software, creating an opportunity to develop mobile solutions that everyone can use.
Public transport companies are already using this regularly, yet, although keeping the user informed, this fails to create engagement with the user and the transport, especially in regards to customer fidelisation.

Collective Mobility

Urban Mobility is one of the most critical factors in a city's life. The new demand for sustainable towns requires for policies that reduce pollution levels, by reducing the number of cars driving in the city, replacing those with collective transportation. There is a need to create strategies that work as an incentive for the use of mass transportation. There are different solutions available, from encouraging the reduction of pollution level by replacing individual cars for collective transit to the increase in benefits of using them. In regards to Tourism, and especially in Madeira, there are several bus lines to the different sightseeing places, making it the best choice regarding mobility. The benefits of using this type of movement are several, but, it might be difficult to transmit that idea to the end user. There is the need to create mechanisms that will create engagement with the user, to persuade it to use a particular service. Among several different options, this project explores a reasonably recent approach called gamification. The idea is to deliver information, to engage users in joint mobility, and also to retrieve new experiences out of this. With this in mind, it is required to create a solution that is sufficiently mobile, but that can deliver a roleplay, with different guidelines, to engage the user into exploring the public transportation network, including the sightseeing places, but also the "regular" bus destinations. With this in mind, the project will include a mobile application, for iOS and Android, developed using cross-platform solutions. This application will also work with a backend server, to store each user's progress within the app, and even with dedicated hardware, that will support the app, to better locate the user. The idea is to add gamification to a collections app. The user is required to proceed to a particular place, by taking a specific bus line. When reaching its destination, a couple of challenges will engage the user, and the final award will be a collectable. Also, while all this happens, the user is exploring the different sightseeing locations.

RELATED WORK

Towards Gamification

The use of newly developed words to reference new concepts might bring some confusion, especially when the term is related to a well established word. This is one of the problems with the concept of Gamification. The close relation to gaming, tends to create a mixture where the use believes that game, gaming and gamification are really the same thing. The idea might have similarities, but it is important to properly establish what each concept means, and how not to mix them.
The concept of Gamification is something that is finally start- ing to become recurrent. The term is relatively new, but the idea of resembling games mechanics and techniques to en- gage with users and to solve problem is already being used at least since 1960 [Zichermann and Cunninghamm, 2011], although not addressed as a concept, the idea was discussed in several publications since then, and even portrayed in dif- ferent Hollywood releases. It was not until 2003 that the term Gamification started hav- ing impact as a whole. Nick Pelling is known for coming up with this term. About 7 years later, and while gaining interest for the word, its definition can be defined as ”The process of game-thinking and game mechanics to en- gage users and solve problems.” [Zichermann and Cunning- hamm, 2011] This definition might seem vague, but the basic idea behind it really is to make it as vague as possible, but always related with game design techniques. The idea is to bring all the different solutions developed in games for non-gaming con- texts. Being this such a broad range, it is expected to bring several different views into gamification, while research in behavioural psychology confirms the success of the different solutions, just like the success of social games. As explained before, the idea of gamification is not new, and there are plenty of examples that support it. For example, parents have been using this for generations, to make children eat vegetables. From the simple request to eat vegetables, that often does not work, to making a game out of it. For example, the airplane landing game, where parents pretend that food is an airplane, or to add a reward system to the experience, like adding something sweet to vegetables, so that it does not seem to be a bad experience. The prob- lem here is that, the airplane landing game does not work all the time, and adding something sweet to vegetables con- tradicts the whole idea of eating vegetables. Both we can establish a connection between this and gamification, as it is the concept of doing something more engaging, while being rewarding. What this means is that by making it a game, and rewarding the user at the end, we are facing positive behavior change. By escalating this to society in general, we amplify its growth. All of this is related to positive reinforcement, to derive new habits out of challenging and rewarding expe- riences. And, interestingly enough, we are facing this more and more everyday, and most of the times, we fail to under- stand it. The term ”engagement” relates to the connection between a consumer and a service. It it also the term that is used when a couple is preparing to spend the rest of their life. together. This might seem out of the blue, but the fact is that engagement is the period of time at which a person has a great deal of connection with another person, place, idea or thing. Although there is no specific metric to evalu- ate engagement, we can use a couple of different metric to reach a conclusion regarding engagement. For example, using Recency, Frequency, Duration, Virality and Ratings, we can derive an engagement score for this. According to each busi- ness type, there might be score fluctuations, as some business types focus more on Frequency and Recency (for example a Restaurant) but less about the Duration. The old idea of pushing customers to buy more is slowing disappearing, as the main goal is to generate more revenue, and not worry so much about sales as a whole. This is why engagement does not follow revenue, instead, behind engagement, revenue fol- lows [Zichermann and Cunninghamm, 2011] With the term Gamification well established, It was then time to develop the different techniques around the the con- cept. Being this concept closely related to Games, it is not un- common to find the mix between Gamification and Games, while failing to understand that although they share some mechanisms, their goals are not really the same. Gamification is not the solution to every problem. In fact, gamification can be thoroughly used everywhere, but only when used properly. What this means is that gamification will not save a terrible idea, but it will create a unique experience where the user is challenged and engaged for a specific situ- ation. For this, there are a number of different approaches, where there isn’t a right one for the job, but a specific set of tools and process-thinking will lead to the best approach possible.

The potential to be fun.

Everything has the potential to be fun if the idea is properly developed. There are a number of examples of situations that in the past were referred as utterly boring, but have been ”transformed” into something interesting. We have examples of applications where the main goal was to planting crops(farmville), waiting tables(diner dash), or even diaper- ing a baby(diaper dash). The idea is common, to transform something regarded as boring, into something that is interesting (hence, creating engagement).

Gamification into Education

There are different approaches for gamification. Some of them are still highly experimental, the others have already given proper results. One of the most experienced ones is in education, where the idea of adding game mechanisms into a container where the study materials are integrated. What it is required to establish is that there is a difference between the gamification of instructional material and the use of serious games to support learning And again, in order to motivate learners, and to succeed in applying gamification to the process, we need to resource to psychology. Motivation is also described as being a technical approach to define ”behaviour”, which represents the reasons for people’s actions, desires and needs.[Eliot and Covington, 2001] Gamification in the learning process brings out the type of motivation that causes a person to want to continue, or repeat the use of learning materials, hence its success when applied to education

The border between a game and an app

There is an increased difficulty on separating what is an application that resources to gaming mechanisms, to an application where the main idea is to be a game. This happens when the definition of gamification is unclear on the development of the app. With this in mind, there is a need to establish that gamification does not relate to playfulness (play). In game development, the distinction between games and play is clear, as the concepts paidia and ludus are well established. One refers to playing paidia, a more free form, expressive, improvisational recombination of behaviors and meanings, while gaming(ludus) captures playing structured by rules and competitive strife towards goals.[Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, Nacke, 2001]

Non-specific examples

The idea on this chapter is to highlight different examples, but not related to a specific theme.
Routing system: Waze is a mobile app available for several platforms. It is a free community-based GPS, Maps and Traffic navigation app. It all started in Israel, by a company named Waze mobile, being then purchased by Google. It all started in 2006, at a small scale, when in Israel a programmed named Ehud Shabtai developed a community project in which there was crowd sourcing assistance from the community. The idea behind was to keep Waze as a free tool, fueled by community. As of 2012, the app had been downloaded more than 12 million times worldwide, escalating to 50 million as of June 2013. Also in 2013, the company was bought by Google for a reported 966 million US dollars. Each of the 100 employees was set to receive about 1.2 million dollars as part of the settlement. The mechanisms to attract users into Waze are mostly based on community interaction. As we know, any project can benefit from gamification if the basis of it is good enough, and waze was developed with the purpose of being driven by community. Basically, waze collects map data, travel times and traffic information. This happens by calculating speed and travelled distance on a given time, making it easy to detect traffic, or if any abnormal situation is happening on the road. This allows the routing server to find the best route for each user, knowing traffic conditions for each road in real time. Adding to these background calculations, Waze was the first to truly develop a crowd-sourced traffic reporting system, somehow, a ”Gamified Driving” solution. Each Waze users has a ”mood”, where there are levels to unlock new ”moods”. This represents how evolved a user might be on the community. Just by using the app, the users is receiving points, thus evolving on the app, get- ting new moods and avatars. The same thing happens if the user reports hazards on the road, or simply engage with other users on the platform. The final goal is to be on the top of the leader-board, or simple check the progress bar being filled until completion. These mechanisms are a great way of creating engagement with the users, but also creating loyal customers, as they create an emotional attach to the app.
Language Learning: Duolingo is a language-learning web- site and application, created by Carnegie Mellon University’s professor Luis von Ahn and his student Severin Hacker. The idea was to create a new mechanism to help people learn new languages at a lower or even no price. Development started in 2009, and the first beta was released in 2011, with more than 30000 people on the waiting list. Duolingo follows the freemium business model, by using advertising in both Android and iOS apps, removable by paying a fee. The core of the system is developed around a gamified skill tree, where users can progress through, while learning a new language. It all starts with a test to evaluate at which level should the user start. This test not only concludes the level where the user should be, but also introduces the application’s mechanisms, creating engagement like that. After completing this evaluation, the user finds himself completing several more levels, since these unlock new features. This artificial scarcity that rewards users, push them towards new goals in the app. Another important part of duolingo are the Language clubs, where different users with the same goal join in, and are competing with each other to be the best in the leader-board.
Professional Social Media: Linkedin is a business- oriented social network. For the untrained eye, one would not suspect that there are so many integrated game me- chanics into their network. These are so well implemented that the engagement level is high, making people return and continue strengthening their profile. There are several game mechanisms built into linkedin, for example, profile completion, where the boring part that is filling all the information in each user’s profile becomes interesting, as there is a ”profile completeness bar”, displaying the percentage of profile completion, while motivation the user to continue fill- ing it with simple encouraging sentences. Another important game mechanism is the profile strength indicator. This is a small figure built into the the profile that displays the per- son’s ”strength” in the user profile, by categorizing the user in levels. Interesting feature, as the figure is never at 100\%, although the highest rank ”all-star” is available. The reason for not having 100\% is because linked-in encourages users to improve their profile, and so, it will never reach 100\%. Lastly, there is the ”skills and Endorsements” section. Having skills will lead to more profile views. Endorsements motivate other users to join each others networks by endorsing skills. This also helps the ”who viewed your profile” mechanism, as more endorsements and changes on the profile will lead to higher view numbers.
By doing this, LinkedIn turned an uninteresting social net- work into an interesting, fun activity, making LinkedIn the leader in professional social networking.
Game Elements and Dynamics
In order to use game mechanisms, it is required to elaborate on game elements and dynamics. These are the layers that define a game, the pieces that all together result in a game. The art of game design classifies 4 main themes that define a game. These are Mechanics, a Story, the Aesthetics and the Technology. It is essential to combine all four of them, without prioritizing any of them, as they are all important to the final result.
The Aesthetics What the user sees, how the game looks, sounds, and feels. This is the most important aspect of game design, since the aesthetics have a direct relationship to the player’s experience. This is the visual part of the experience, it is responsible for the experience, to make it immerse. This works with the mechanics of the game, as the mechanics of the game should be able to support the visual part, by amplifying and reinforcing it. As described by [Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, Nacke, 2001]:
” You will want to choose mechanics that make players feel like they are in the world that the aesthetics have defined, and you will want a story with a set of events that let your aesthetics emerge at the right pace and have the most impact ” The aesthetics are also responsible for creating and reinforcing a memorable experience. Technology Not the generic term technology, we refer to technology here as the materials and interactions that make the game possible, from the common pen, pencil board games, to the high-powered lasers and hardware. Technology is what blends the player with the game, allowing an entire new set of game-play mechanics.

A more thorough analysis

Previously, I did elaborate on an abstraction of the game con- cept, where there was a high-level description of each main theme on a game, yet, there are different overviews available for the game concept. For instance, in [Werbach and Hunter 2012], Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter explain that ”At the highest level of abstraction are dynamics. Dynamics are the big-picture aspects of the gamified system that you have to consider and manage but which you can never directly enter into the game.” There are 5 different game dynamics:
Constraints - limitations or forced trade-offs
Emotions - curiosity, competitiveness, happiness, frustration
Narrative - the storyline
Progression - the player’s growth and development Relationships - the social interactions

With these game dynamics, the highest abstraction of the game is achieved, as these are mandatory for every game. For these to express within the game, it is required that the mechanics also work. Mechanics ”are the basic processes that drive the action forward and generate player engagement”.

According to [Werbach and Hunter, 2012], there are at least 10 game mechanics.
Challenges - Tasks that require effort
Chance - The randomness part of the game Competition - To allow one player or group to win Cooperation - To help each other to achieve the goal
The Mechanics Commonly know as the procedures or rules of the game. These describe the intent of the game, the challenge and the options the user has, to overcome the challenges, resulting in a certain goal. These are highly de- pendent from the other elements, as they need to support the mechanics, and, as such, one needs to be careful when choosing technology to support them, a proper aesthetics that deliver the idea to the player, and a good story to make all elements work together.
The Story One of the most engaging features of the game, the story is a sequence of events that happen during game development, either scripted, or emergent, as the game evolves. The story depends on game mechanics and technology, and uses these to strengthen the story, that reinforce the main ideas of the game. Stories and games can each be thought of as machines that help create experiences, as stories and games can be combined, and, when they do so, there are techniques that can create experiences that neither a game- less story or a story-less game could create on its own.
3 Feedback - Show the player his performance stats Resource Acquisition - Receiving valuable items in the game
Rewards - Returning a prize possession for the player
Transactions - Trading between players, items or valuable information.
Turns - Sequencing each player’s turn to play
Win States - objectives that make one player or group win

Then, we have the Components.Components make up the largest group of game elements. In many ways the components are more specific form of either Dynamics or Mechanics.
These elements are less abstract than the first two categories and lead to actual tools that can be employed to begin to in- corporate gamification in the environment of interest. Below, there are a few examples of the different components available.
Choosing the right ones is important, to obtain proper balance in the final result. Adapted from [Werbach and Hunter, 2012]
Achievements - defined objectives
Avatars - visual representations of a player’s character
Badges - visual representations of achievements
Boss Fights - especially hard challenges at the culmination of a level
Collections - sets of items or badges to accumulate
Combat - a defined battle, typically short-lived
Content Unlocking - aspects available only when players reach objectives
Gifting - opportunities to share resources with others Leader-boards - visual displays of player progression and achievement
Levels - defined steps in player progression
Points - numerical representations of game progression
Quests - predefined challenges with objectives and rewards
Social Graph - representation of players’ social network within the game
Teams - defined groups of players working together for a common goal
Virtual Goods - game assets with perceived or real-money value

So, Gamification is, on a top-down approach, a design process. These component and mechanics selection happens at the end of the design process, while the whole implementation follows 6 Gamification is, in fact, a design process.
Werbach emphasizes that deploying the appropriate Mechanics and Components actually comes at the very end of the design process. The implementation of gamification follows a progression of steps:
1. Define business objectives
2. Delineate target behaviours
3. Describe players 4. Devise activity cycles
5. Incorporate
6. Deploy the appropriate Mechanics and Components

USED RESOURCES

TBD

TBD

THE PROJECT

TBD

TBD

RESULTS

TBD

TBD

CONCLUSIONS

TBD.

TBD.