A Gamified News Application for Mobile Devices: An Approach that Turns Digital News Readers into Players of a Social Network

摘要

Gamification is a well known approach nowadays for achieving the ultimate goal of motivating loyalty with a brand and engaging users with given tasks in a variety of fields. However, attempts made to use gamification techniques in news industry have given poor results, pointing to the conclusion that journalism may not an open field for gamification to thrive. At the same time changes in news consumption across the globe show a rapid rise of news audiences accessing stories through their mobile devices, while social media play a huge role in distribution of online news. This paper examines the combination of these three trends, gamification, smartphones and social media in a promising and possibly successful way.