The purpose of this paper is to explore how gamification may be used for project stakeholder engagement.
The paper presents the results of a systematic literature review of extant research concerning the gamification of projects. Based on this, an agenda for future studies is outlined.
Extant research on the gamification of projects is scarce and scattered among various disciplines, but the engineering fields dominate. The research performed does indicate that gamification may be used for involving stakeholders in projects, primarily by promoting learning, but also by engaging them, motivating action and solving problems.
In several cases, extant research display poor quality in research design and a lack in cross-disciplinary perspectives, which means that more research is needed. The users’ perspective is often lacking. Furthermore, the ideas gamification might be “hidden” within other technologies.
The findings of this research may assist project management practitioners in the endeavor of adopting gamification principles to better involve stakeholders.
The study fills a gap in summarizing the research on how gamification may be used to promote project stakeholder engagement. Based on this, it proposes a research agenda for future research on the use of gamification to promote project stakeholder engagement.
1. Introduction
Since the pioneering work of Freeman (1984), who first introduced the concept of stakeholders beyond the groups of shareholders, clients and customers, the ideas that projects have stakeholders, and that these need to be managed, have become taken for granted in project research and practice (Cleland, 1986; El-Gohary et al., 2006; Karlsen, 2002; Newcombe, 2003; Olander, 2007; Olander and Landin, 2005). Defined as “any individual or group who can affect or be affected by the project process or the project outcomes” (Eskerod, 2014, p. 43), stakeholders are seen as contributing resources to projects (Eskerod, 2014). This, of course, means that “stakeholders” also include the project team members, who quickly need to build “swift trust” to become productive, as the successful delivery of the task is dependent on an interdependent set of diverse skills and knowledge among team members (Meyerson et al., 1996). Stakeholders also play an important role in if and how the project is defined as “successful” (Davis, 2014).
Hence, the engagement of stakeholders in projects is claimed to be key to value creation as well as project success (Bayiley and Teklu, 2016; Oppong et al., 2017). It has also been argued that stakeholder management that views stakeholders as contributors to project value is more in line with managing for stakeholders, rather than about the management of stakeholders (Dalpiaz et al., 2017; Deterding, 2019; Deterding et al., 2011; Freeman, 2010; Freeman et al., 2007, p. 2; Huemann et al., 2016).
Achieving project stakeholder engagement, however, has proven difficult. Every project contains a plurality of “stakeholder landscapes” (Aaltonen and Kujala, 2016, p. 1537) as stakeholders commonly represent a wide range of expectations and interests due to variation in the profession, culture, educational level, gender and proximity to the project, and conflicts between various stakeholders in a project are not rare (Chan and Oppong, 2017; Eskerod et al., 2015a; Jepsen and Eskerod, 2009; Oppong et al., 2017). The underlying idea is that not all stakeholders are the same, or have the same interest in the project and that this needs to be acknowledged when deciding how to communicate with and engage them (Eskerod et al., 2015a; Freeman et al., 2007; Freeman, 2010; Huemann et al., 2016).
In order to rectify this problem, various strategies for project stakeholder engagement have been proposed, generally including the proactive planning and management of roles, responsibilities and activities (Eskerod et al., 2015a). More specifically, these include the designing of activities for engaging stakeholders in various forms of dialogue (Aaltonen and Sivonen, 2009; Di Maddaloni and Davis, 2018; Lehtinen et al., 2019), the use of visualization strategies (Walker et al., 2008) and the adoption of various agile methods, as these have proven to have a positive impact on stakeholder satisfaction (Serrador and Pinto, 2015). Despite these suggestions, project stakeholder engagement remains difficult.
Recently, gamification has been suggested as a way to develop stakeholder engagement (e.g. Coulton, 2015; Rangaswami, 2015). Defined as “using game-based mechanics, aesthetics and game thinking to engage people, motivate action, promote learning and solve problems” (Kapp, 2012, p. 10), gamification relies on motivation theories and theories stemming from human–computer interaction. Gamification thus denotes the use of structural design principles and patterns to enhance the motivation of people in work settings by deploying game attributes in digital or non-digital forms (Armstrong and Landers, 2018; Bevins and Howard, 2018), examples being points, levels, leaderboards, achievements and badges. The ultimate purpose is to change human behavior (Robson et al., 2015; Wood and Reiners, 2015) by engaging stakeholders for a common cause; making them take action for this cause and promoting their learning so that problems standing in the way of the achievement of the cause are resolved (cf. Kapp, 2012). As these dimensions are also key to involving stakeholders in projects – to securing their participation in the project (Eskerod et al., 2015b) – gamification is thus a promising path for developing stakeholder engagement.
In product and process innovation settings, for example, gamification has become increasingly popular in the past 15 years (Warmelink et al., 2018), and it has been argued that specific game elements in this setting can positively affect perceived task meaningfulness, competence need, satisfaction and social relatedness (Sailer et al., 2017). Since gamification can be used to elicit meaningfulness, competence, satisfaction and social relatedness, then it stands to reason that gamification could potentially be a promising way to improve stakeholder engagement in projects. However, there is no comprehensive mapping of the research performed on the gamification of projects, which means there is no clear point of departure for research aiming at advancing the gamification of projects generally, and in the context of stakeholder management specifically. This is what this paper seeks to amend.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze how gamification has been used to engage stakeholders in projects. This will be accomplished through an integrative literature review (Kunisch et al., 2023), that allows for an analysis of where the elements of gamification can be integrated with stakeholder management.
The integrative review carried out in this paper will use the main elements or principles of gamification to understand how gamification is used in projects to engage stakeholders of various kinds. The paper therefore first describes what gamification can be, where the idea came from, how it has been adopted in different organizational contexts and how it has developed into a methodology to elicit the interest and engagement of particular parties, such as stakeholders. After that, the methodological choices for the review are presented and discussed and the section ends with an overview of the 41 papers included in the sample. The findings in this paper show how the four main dimensions of gamification, as defined by Kapp (2012), are used to entice stakeholder engagement of various kinds. By engaging people, promoting learning, motivating action and solving problems (Kapp, 2012), both internal and external stakeholders can be brought to engage with a specific project in ways that they otherwise might not have. Last, the outcome of the review is discussed and avenues for future research are laid out.
Second, we describe how the systemic literature review was carried out in this context and report the results in line with the four dimensions of gamification as proposed by Kapp (2012). Although developed in the context of training and education, it makes sense to use Kapp’s definition here since regardless of the context, the ultimate goal of gamification is to create engagement (Kapp, 2012), which is what stakeholder involvement is also about (Lehtinen et al., 2019; Payne and Calton, 2017).
2. Gamification: definition, roots and applications
Described as an approach, rather than a design process or full set of instructional methods (Bevins and Howard, 2018), “gamification” is about inducing people to engage in a defined activity or process (e.g. training, developing and producing) in a game-like way – for example, by using badges, leaderboards or rewards (Armstrong and Landers, 2018, p. 1200). This means that gamification may be described as “an informal umbrella term for the use of video game elements in non-gaming systems to improve user experience (UX) and user engagement” (Deterding et al., 2011, p. 2). Some of the most common game mechanics include achievements (e.g. experience points, levels and bonuses), exercises (e.g. challenges and discoveries), synchronizing with the community (e.g. leaderboards and collaboration), result transparency (e.g. experience bars and continuous feedback), time (e.g. countdown and measuring speed) and luck (e.g. lottery or random achievements) (Dale, 2014; Kapp, 2012).
Although the first documented use of the concept of gamification was in the early parts of this millennium (Dale, 2014; Kapp, 2012), gaming principles have been used for a long time – for example, in the military (Dicheva et al., 2015). Gamification has gone from being a buzzword to denoting a popular way of thinking, and it is implemented to improve production (Warmelink et al., 2018), improve communication with stakeholders (Trittin et al., 2019), provide better conditions for training (Armstrong and Landers, 2018), enhance education (Bevins and Howard, 2018; Dicheva et al., 2015) and even improve people’s health (see Korn and Schmidt, 2015 who also provide a good overview of the uptake of the concept). Gamification is also an important design principle in the contemporary capitalism of the “interface economy”, incorporated in algorithms in a variety of Web-based services such as Uber, Airbnb and so on (Finn, 2018). It thus makes sense to speak about a trend of the “gamification of work” in contemporary society (Trittin et al., 2019).
The use of gamification relies on the use of design principles and patterns that enhance individual motivation and the affordances of computers and software (Jung et al., 2010; Zhang, 2008) and involves using knowledge from the motivational theory (Ryan et al., 2006) and persuasive technology (Fogg, 2002). The aim is to introduce elements of fun – what has been called “funology” (Blythe et al., 2004) – in contexts other than play. This means that what is commonly called “gamification” is different from “serious games”, in which complete games, such as LEGO, are used, rather than game elements, “to educate individuals in a specific content domain” (Kapp, 2012, p. 15).
Using game elements involves limiting the user’s autonomy (Deci et al., 1999) since the aim is to steer user behavior in a particular way (Lockton et al., 2010). This means that gamification brings with it a set of embedded values regarding right and wrong behavior, and the ultimate aim is to change user behavior accordingly (Barr et al., 2007). Some argue that this is the best way to better accommodate the needs of the millennials, the digital generation who are said to need instant gratification (Beck and Wade, 2006).
One of the fields in which gamification has been used the longest is education (Kapp, 2012). In the education setting, gamifying the learning environment has been an acknowledged way to improve student learning. In undergraduate and graduate education, project management students have learned about decision-making through digital games in which they manage fictitious projects or try out project management tools.
From this perspective, gamification has had the purpose of enhancing student learning, hopefully, to better equip them for their future careers. This learning can be enhanced in different ways: an opportunity for students to test their skills in games, games enable more students to participate in the learning activities, students are driven to perform well in the game setting, which drives their learning as well, etc.
This has led to the reframing of gamification as a method not just to improve education but also to enhance motivation and involvement in all sorts of shared endeavors. In his definition, Kapp makes this connection by arguing that gamification is about “us[ing] game-based mechanics, aesthetics and game thinking to engage people, motivate action, promote learning and solve problems” (2012, p. 1). Creating ways to engage people, motivate action in the service of a shared cause and promote learning to solve common problems is relevant in a myriad of other settings in which keeping people’s attention and penetrating the “noise” is difficult – also in the context of projects. Gamification thus seems like a promising path to making project stakeholders co-creators of value (Fuentes, 2019).
3. Research approach
For this paper, an integrative literature review was carried out. An integrative review should ideally result in a more integrative and coherent use of knowledge (Kunisch et al., 2023). In this case, the integration is between the research on stakeholder management and gamification in projects. The outcome of this integrative review is new insight into how gamification is currently used to engage stakeholders in a variety of ways – even if it might not be explicitly framed as stakeholder engagement. Since an integrative review allows for the reviewers to connect different groups of literature and view a topic from several perspectives (Kunisch et al., 2023), this is a suitable form of review for the present paper.
The review was performed in six major steps, detailed in Figure 1. The steps will be briefly explained with a focus on what decisions were taken in each step, and with what consequences.
3.1 Methodological stages
In Step 1, we defined the search terms and scope of the search, including the database. A building block search strategy was used. A building block search is helpful to identify papers that use related keywords in certain combinations. In this search, two search blocks were constructed – one for gamification and one for project work.
In this step, the first main decision was made. Since the purpose of the review was to catalog and understand how gamification is used to improve stakeholder engagement, the chosen search terms included words related to gamification specifically. In addition, an exploratory test was carried out in which related terms were included: leaderboard, point system, badge and scrum. These generated over 18,000 posts (the limit in SCOPUS). One of the authors drew random samples from this search and evaluated the papers. The ones that did not include gamification or similar topics did not discuss or value the use of a gamification-related tool. Therefore, the list of related search terms in the GAMES block consisted only of the word “gamification” and truncated forms of the word, as seen in Table 1. This table shows the resulting two blocks of search terms. The terms in the project management block were used to cover both explicit terms in relation to the term “project” such as “projectification”, “projects” and “project management”.
In congruence with developing the search blocks, the following databases were sampled: SCOPUS, EBSCOhost, ProQuest and Web of Science. To yield relevant papers, the database needed to include all major project management journals and cover business studies, industrial management and social sciences. We chose SCOPUS, as it covers a wider range of journals in the project management field, compared with ProQuest and EBSCOhost (Chadegani et al., 2013; Oraee et al., 2017).
In Step 2, the search with the finalized blocks in SCOPUS was performed. The search with the building blocks generated 4486 papers, which is within the normal range for this type of search (Bakker, 2010). To narrow the focus of the review, 18 categories, as assigned to journals by SCOPUS, were excluded. These 18 categories were arts and humanities, psychology, mathematics, environmental science, decision science, medicine, health professions, physics and astronomy, earth and planetary sciences, materials science, dentistry, energy, chemistry, chemical engineering, agriculture, biochemistry, nursing, and pharmacology. In the resulting search, the keyword “game theory” was also excluded, given that game theory is a mathematical modeling method that does not pertain to gamification. By applying these limitations, 2143 papers were extracted as the main data for the review.
In Step 3, all 2143 papers were coded independently and iteratively by all three authors, as recommended in reviews with a qualitative approach, for instance, by Potter and Levine-Donnerstein (1999) as well as Mourão et al. (2020). Each author read all the titles and abstracts and coded the papers as “included”, “excluded” or “unsure”. The inclusion criterion was that the paper discussed the gamification of work in projects. After the independent coding was finished, all the papers were examined in respect of the three codes simultaneously. Papers with three inclusion or exclusion codes were automatically included/excluded. Papers with differing codes and all papers that at least one author had marked as “unsure” were discussed concerning the inclusion criteria. This led to a list of exclusion criteria: papers that reported on projects in which the objective was to develop or implement a game, papers that reported on projects in educational settings in which games were used to improve learning in a particular subject, papers that reported on particular game events as projects, and papers in which the researcher used games, game software or game theory as a methodological or analytical tool. Twenty-seven papers were marked as “unsure” – these were papers that either presented games to teach project management to students or papers for which the inclusion criteria could not be verified based on the abstract and keywords. Twenty-nine papers were marked as included, making a total of 56 papers.
In Step 4, the discussion after the first round of independent coding led to a second round of independent coding. Each author independently coded that paper based on the same inclusion/exclusion criteria again, while reading the whole paper instead of only the abstract, title and keywords. This resulted in the study including 34 papers, each of which had at least two independent coders coding them as included. In this round, papers presenting games to teach project management to students were excluded. The papers were found to not discuss gamification concerning the work carried out in projects, but rather to engage students in learning more about project management skills.
The third round of coding, in Step 5, was a reverse snowballing round (Mourão et al., 2020). In this round, all included papers were read and key references were extracted and coded according to the same coding scheme. This resulted in an additional seven papers that fit the inclusion criteria but that had not been included due to database choice. This resulted in 41 included papers.
In the fourth round of coding, Step 6, included papers were read again and independently coded based on Kapp’s (2012) four elements of gamification identified as (1) engage people, (2) motivate action, (3) promote learning and (4) solve problems. In this round, the authors first read and interpreted Kapp’s four elements to gain a shared understanding of what they could mean in a project management setting. The authors agreed that the coding scheme should focus on the main aim of the gamification tool/method/approach in each paper, and each paper was coded according to what element corresponded best. After the authors had finished the coding, results were compared, and discrepancies were discussed. In three cases – Perng et al. (2006), Hannula and Irrmann (2016) and Tang and Prestopnik (2019) – two dimensions were deemed equally important and these three papers are therefore discussed in, respectively, two dimensions.
An overview of the included papers is found in Appendix, including the journals they were published in, and when they were published. In summary, the research on gamification in projects comes across as immature and fragmented, evincing a strong need for further theorizing. The overview shows a fragmented stream of research, with journals in differing fields and over a long period, with a strong emphasis after 2000. Only one included paper is published before 2000, in 1981. The remaining 41 are published between 2000 and 2021, with no specific year/years standing out.
The overview reveals a wide range of journals spanning the fields of management, engineering, informatics and software. Journal categorization was part of the coding process, in which the journals’ “abstracting and indexing” was reviewed. Ten papers were published in management-related journals: the International Journal of Project Management (two papers), the International Journal of Technology Management (one paper), Facilities (one paper), the Journal of Modern Project Management (one paper), the VINE Journal of Information and Knowledge Management (one paper), the Project Management Journal (one paper), the Aslib Journal of Information Management (one paper), the Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics (one paper) and Creativity and Innovation Management (one paper). Three papers were published in engineering-related journals: Research in Engineering Design (one paper), Technicki Vjesnik (one paper) and Requirements Engineering (one paper). Eight papers were published in journals that are related to both management and engineering: the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management (four papers), Engineering Construction and Architectual Management (two papers), IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (one paper), and Architectural Engineering and Design Management (one paper). Eight papers were published in journals related to informatics and software: Simulation and Gaming (two papers), Journal of Systems and Software (two papers), Computer Science and Information Systems (one paper), Information Technology People (one paper), Entertainment Computing (one paper), Computers and Education (one paper) and Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference (one paper, conference). Nine papers were published in journals related to engineering, informatics and software: the Journal of Information Technology in Construction (two papers), Advanced Engineering Informatics (two papers), Automation in Construction (one paper), the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (one paper), the Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering (one paper), the International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering (one paper, conference) and the Proceedings of the ACM Human–Computer Interaction (one paper, conference). This means that about half the sample (19 of 41) came from management-related journals, but only three papers were published in journals specifically related to project management. This indicates that interest among project management scholars in the gamification of projects is so far limited. Furthermore, two industries seem to dominate the empirical settings of the included papers: two-thirds report on gamification taking place in the construction/infrastructure industry and the software industry.
All of the papers in the sample except Cockburn (2004) are empirical – the majority of papers (24) have some sort of experimental research design carried out according to a setup that is typical for engineering contexts. In practice, this often means that first, the authors report on the design of one (or two) games, then participants are engaged to test them, and finally, the authors report on the results. In most cases, however, the descriptions of the research design are weak, and in several cases, the reliability of the results is open to question.
All in all, this suggests that research on the gamification of projects is still at an early stage of development. There is a need for more robust empirical studies that take seriously the task of theorizing gamification.
4. Mobilizing gamification in projects for stakeholder management
In the following section, we will analyze more closely what the 41 papers that were selected using the SLR say about the gamification of projects, and what that teaches us about stakeholder engagement. The section will be structured according to Kapp’s (2012) four dimensions: engage people, motivate action, promote learning and solve problems.
4.1 Engage people
Engaging stakeholders in projects means being able to reach stakeholders and communicate with them and maintaining this communication over time. The result of engaged stakeholders would be to improve the project because of this engagement and involving stakeholders who would otherwise be neglected, which is important from not only a functional but also an ethical point of view (Eskerod et al., 2015a). According to Kapp (2012, p. 11), engaging people is the dimension of gamification that enables one to “gain a person’s attention and … involve him or her”. In this case, the people who should be engaged are those who, in some capacity, have a stake in the project. From this perspective, gamification would appear to be highly relevant to stakeholder management, in which engagement is claimed to be the crucial feature (Heravi et al., 2015).
The 13 papers about engaging people, as seen in Table 2, indicate that this has been done in two ways: by using gamification to overcome communication barriers (four papers) and to reach otherwise neglected stakeholders (six papers). All but five of the papers included in this category are different forms of experiments or tests. The remaining five apply classic qualitative research methods, such as field studies (Goulding et al., 2007; Patricio et al., 2020; Simon, 2006), exploration (Kautz, 2011) and a comparison (Tang and Prestopnik, 2019). The gamification elements seen in these papers have a focus on game rules and reward systems, which seems to indicate that engagement could come through structured processes focusing on how and when to engage.
One example of how gamification may be used in practice to overcome communication barriers with project stakeholders is provided by Simon (2006), who proposes that design games may be used to “scaffold” dialogue between stakeholders in development projects, also in the early phases of co-design. Shreeve et al. (2020) overcome barriers through a game where stakeholders can test their risk level and through this harmonized way be able to discuss risk and risk-taking on shared terms. Ghanbari et al. (2015) propose the use of serious gaming to elicit information in software development projects, in which the temporal, geographic and sociocultural diversity of the stakeholders could otherwise present formidable barriers to successful project development. Kautz (2011) shows that involving customers and users in the agile development of new software through the use of planning games, user stories and story cards supported a balance between flexibility on the one hand and project progress on the other. In this case, this resulted in a project as well as a product that was considered a success by the customer and the development organization alike. Last, Patricio et al. (2020) improve stakeholder engagement by introducing a gamification method to help participants in co-creation projects collaborate and organize their projects. The tools, which include typical gamification elements, improve stakeholder engagement in the co-creation by making the project easier to administrate, organize and plan; thereby overcoming communication barriers.
That gamification may be used to involve otherwise neglected stakeholders in projects is something that several studies bring up. One example is Leite et al. (2016), who report on the design, implementation and evaluation of a gamified system through which production assignments were made transparent to construction workers, thereby increasing their involvement. Another example is Tang and Prestopnik (2019) who conducted an experimental study that showed that gamification elements increased the perceived enjoyment of citizens involved in a “citizen science” project. Also, Alexandrova and Rapanotti (2020) describe the use of a game to involve stakeholders in the discussion on rules and flow of a project. Broberg (2010) used the workspace design game to engage stakeholders – the workers in a mixing plant – in the changes made; and van Amstel and Garde (2016) describe another workspace design case, in which a design team used board games to engage people, mainly volunteers, in the architectural layout of new buildings. Golrang and Safari (2021) developed a gamified crowdfunding platform as a way to engage funding providers in different projects. By gamifying the platform itself, the idea was to increase the number of people who make donations and become stakeholders in the different charity projects. From a project perspective, this implies an opportunity to reach otherwise neglected stakeholders. A final example is the study by Goulding et al. (2007), who build a case for the involvement of school children in school construction projects through gamification by arguing that
[…] the adoption of computer games offers a myriad of opportunities to interact with school children in order to maximize their engagement in the design process in an easy and interesting way (Goulding et al., 2007, p. 225).
From this, we can infer that gamification is a highly relevant approach to engaging project stakeholders – the main purpose of stakeholder engagement. Gamification has been used to address and overcome communication barriers, turning external stakeholders into internal ones, and as a way to involve stakeholders who might otherwise get neglected.
4.2 Motivate action
In stakeholder management, motivating action is essential, as it is not only about involving stakeholders in decision-making in projects but also about taking an active part in the project (Freeman et al., 2007; Huemann et al., 2016). Methodologies that have had this aim have proven particularly successful in the past: a prominent example would be agile methodologies that are deliberately designed to encourage cooperative action throughout a project life cycle (Dybå and Dingsøyr, 2008; Serrador and Pinto, 2015). This resonates with the description of motivating action given by Kapp (2012): motivating enhances action, by energizing people and giving them “direction, purpose or meaning”, meaning that it may be useful for “driving participation in an action or activity” (Kapp, 2012, p. 12).
A total of six papers represent the “motivate action” category. The category has one of the smallest samples in this study, at the same time, they represent a wide range of research designs. As seen in Table 3, the research designs range from Cockburn’s (2004) conceptual discussion and Gupta and Woolley’s (2018) experiment with an unprecise articulation of empirical evidence to Tang and Prestopnik’s (2019) structured comparison of using gamification vs. not using it, and Jun et al.’s (2020) experiment on engaging stakeholders in corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects specifically. The project aspects that are addressed in this sample relate strongly to stakeholder engagement, cooperation and communication. There is also an alignment between what gamification dimensions are mobilized in this category: bar Cockburn (2004), all the papers employ some sort of points or reward system to motivate stakeholders to take action.
On the one hand, the study by Yilmaz and O'Connor (2016) seems to indicate that the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of team members may be increased through gamification. In their study of a software development project in an SME, the team used a combination of the agile methodologies of Scrum and Kanban (i.e. Scrumban) and a series of game elements. Results showed that the use of Scrumban and gamification provided a systematic performance improvement of the team, by encouraging team members to be socially connected.
On the other hand, in their study of citizens’ participation in a citizen science project, Tang and Prestopnik (2019) used game framing and task framing to better understand how these types of framing affected perceived meaningfulness and enjoyment, as mentioned above. Although the study shows that game framing and task framing did have a significant impact on citizens’ perceived enjoyment, game framing did not have a significant effect on perceived meaningfulness, whereas task framing did. Furthermore, perceived meaningfulness did not directly impact participation behavior. The authors argue that these results can be explained by the study design but conclude that more studies are needed.
Gupta and Woolley (2018) conducted an experiment to test the effects of working in multiple project teams and determine whether these effects might be moderated using a dashboard with information. The dashboard showed information about all the projects and project teams an individual was part of. The study indicates that the dashboard helps motivate the project members to better and more efficiently work within their respective projects, it provides direction, and it can support project purpose and meaning, in effect filtering out actions that promote the purpose, and those that do not. This was tested using an online team simulation game that showed that in cases in which someone is involved in multiple teams with few member overlaps – a so-called complex setting – the dashboard helps. However, it does not necessarily help in less complex cases; in other words, when the overlap between teams is greater.
Two papers propose to motivate action through explicit games. Cockburn (2004, p. 2) proposes a “series of resource-limited, goal-directed cooperative games of invention and communication” and describes various methodologies that can be used in software development projects if these are envisaged as games. The author means that this can help researchers understand why software engineering projects fail and improve on that failure rate. Jun et al. (2020) also investigate how gamification can motivate action in CSR projects. In an extensive simulation-type study, they had several participants try out different simulations of gamified CSR to develop knowledge about the kind of motivation to continue to participate in and pay for CSR people might have. The gamification component not only brings people into CSR projects but also spurs them to take such action they otherwise would not have, such as contributing, monetarily or otherwise, toward CSR.
In addition to these studies on the effect of gamification on motivating action, there are a few studies that do not have this as their focus, but which use it as a rationale for conducting the study. In their paper “A framework for gamification in software engineering”, García et al. (2017) develop and test a general model (the GOAL framework) of how software development projects might be gamified. The main argument for using the framework is to increase motivation, thereby enhancing project delivery, and in the empirical study reported on in the paper three areas were gamified: requirements management (elicitation and analysis), project management (project monitoring) and software testing (test and issue management). However, the paper does not report on the effect of gamification, since the purpose of the study was to test the framework, not to empirically investigate the effects of gamification.
Even though the sample size was small (six papers), our conclusion based on these papers is that gamification may increase motivation in projects, and the results are inconclusive as to whether gamification has a positive effect on people’s motivation. Based on this, there is an indication that gamification may be used to engage stakeholders and through this engagement to motivate them to take action. As described by Kapp (2012), gamification can be used to spark an interest in the gamified component of the project, rather than in the project itself.
4.3 Promote learning
Understanding how a project is successful is a pluralistic discussion that goes beyond individual perspectives (Reed et al., 2010; Schwilch et al., 2012). Today’s projects often have the goal of solving complex problems that require reciprocal sense-making processes in which a multitude of perspectives may be relevant (Payne and Calton, 2002) – for example, in complex environmental contexts that require the embracing of a diversity of knowledge and values on the part of experts as well as the public (Luyet et al., 2012; Reed, 2008). This makes learning essential to stakeholder engagement, as stakeholders’ learning is highly relevant to contextual understanding of what success means for the specific project and how to get to that successful state. Given that learning is at the heart of gamification and has been used to promote learning in several different settings, including education (Kapp, 2012), gamification could be used to provide better conditions for and interest in learning about particular parts of a project or about the project as a whole.
The papers in the review show that learning among stakeholders could be promoted both individually and collectively through game-like situations. This would be beneficial for the project as it would improve the outcome. As seen in Table 4, about half of the papers in this category also used a research design that involves designing and testing a game. This research design is often used when the gamification element is some kind of simulation, meaning that these papers describe the testing of a developed simulation. In this category, the project aspects to which the gamification relates are also widespread. There is some indication that gamifying to promote learning is used particularly in the first stages of a project; here, planning (five papers) and decision-making (five papers) make up half the sample, while the other half relates mainly to communication among different project stakeholders.
By designing and using game-like situations and Virtual Reality, team members can learn specific tasks needed for the project (Isaacs et al., 2011). Examples provided in the literature include general on-the-job training (Goulding et al., 2012) as well as particular tasks, such as tower crane dismantling (Li et al., 2012b). Gamification is also used to train project members in safety at a construction plant (Guo et al., 2012), and to increase awareness of safety hazards (Li et al., 2012a).
Closely connected are situations where a simulation is used to promote learning among a group of stakeholders. Rumeser and Emsley (2018, 2019) have in two studies followed how project managers can reflect on their own practice and how they make decisions together with other stakeholders. Project managers need to take decisions that are not only promoting their own project but also taking the project context into account. In a similar fashion, Solan and Shtub (2021) experiment with a simulation to enhance planning in complex environments. Here, the simulations are used to improve on how the projects are planned and managed, which is increasingly important in a complex environment. Overall, promoting learning through a simulation with a game component is one of the more prominent options (Goulding et al., 2007; Johansson et al., 2002; Martin, 2000; Perng et al., 2006; Sacks et al., 2007).
Gamification is also used to enhance stakeholders’ learning collectively. Baird and Flavell (1981) is the earliest published article in this study and yet promotes a simulation of shared decision-making for project managers. Other early research indicates that gamification may be successful in promoting learning in collaborative workspace design projects (Broberg, 2010) as well as in other participatory design projects (Merschbrock et al., 2016). A gamified environment can also be used to enhance collective learning within a project team and with their surroundings to improve team relations where team members are involved in many projects at the same time or only do specific tasks within the project (El-Tayeh et al., 2008). Collective learning with the aim of finding common grounds for rules and flow within a project is also evidenced within this category of papers (Hastak et al., 2007), as is collective learning to improve a certain and central function among a group of specific project managers (here supply-chain activities and construction project managers) (Van Den Berg et al., 2017).
Existing research indicates that deploying gamification for learning in a project may also improve the outcome of the project. In their study, Hannula and Irrmann (2016) describe how stakeholders learned to collaborate by playing a design game for co-service design. In this context, the authors suggest, the game functioned as a scaffold through which the stakeholders learned to co-create and to interact and collaborate. This, in turn, resulted in a better project outcome.
Learning and promoting learning is the topic that features most in the reviewed papers (20 papers). Using game-like settings to promote the performance, and hence the learning, of a task would appear to be the most basic application of gamification. By playing you learn the game, and by becoming better at playing you also become better at whatever the game or gamified elements support. Given the extent to which it has been used in project settings already, with several favorable outcomes, it is strongly indicated that gamification can be used to promote learning among project stakeholders.
4.4 Solve problems
Collaborative problem-solving is a dimension of many projects today, not only because the resulting solutions prove better but because collaborative problem-solving resolves and counteracts conflicts in projects (Cheng et al., 2020). It is generally agreed that projects dealing with “wicked problems”, i.e. problems that may be classified as involving high complexity, uncertainty and contested social values (Rittel and Webber, 1973), such as sustainability projects (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993), require careful stakeholder involvement (Parrott, 2017). Gamification can also be used to solve problems – “the cooperative nature of games can focus more than one individual on solving a problem” (Kapp, 2012, p. 12) – and could be both a cooperative and a competitive endeavor that engages stakeholders in “together accomplishing the goal of winning” (parsed from Kapp, 2012, p. 12).
So far, with only seven papers in the sample, this rationale for gamifying projects seems rather under-researched, see Table 5. The papers in this category are highly technical, and solving problems is rarely the focus of the research. Instead, problem-solving is dealt with as a taken-for-granted consequence of gamification and as a promising technical possibility. In this sample, all papers have a research design in which a particular game has been designed. In half the cases, the game is also tested in some way. The six papers also address a variety of aspects of stakeholder engagement. These range from Chavada et al. (2012), who develop a bidding game that could be used by project managers and subcontractors to help them understand the landscape in which their projects exist, to Janssen et al. (2020), in which the stakeholders might play the game to better work together. In these papers, visualizations are the primary gamification element used, in combination with a simulation or game. Also, Hajifathalian et al. (2016) make the example of a game that project managers can play to understand the value of planning because the game is likely to have more issues when it is not properly planned.
An example of a paper in which increased opportunities for solving problems is dealt with as a consequence of gamification is Perng et al. (2006), in which gamification – as mentioned above – is used to promote the learning of bidding. As a consequence of developing this skill, the project managers also solved the problem of how to secure the financially most advantageous tender. In another example, described by Janssen et al. (2020), project groups get to practice solving problems together in a simulation. The game Port of Mars, which requires each participant must balance his or her own needs with those of the community, trains teams to maintain this balance while dealing with unexpected events, competition from other teams, and limited resources.
In the studies on the use of gamification to solve problems in projects, simulation and visualization are presented as key. Chavada et al. (2012), for example, present a gamified framework for integrating BIM and project planning to solve workspace issues while Li et al. (2015) propose a new way of planning construction projects with the help of a 4D game simulation. Testing the game on the construction of a viaduct in Hong Kong, they conclude that simulating the relationship between construction space, resources and schedule (i.e. combining BIM and scheduling) allows for improved project planning since the game allows the project team to repeatedly simulate a large variety of options, thus solving problems related to project planning.
Similarly, Lin et al. (2018) describe the use of a database-supported VR/BIM-based communication and simulation (DVBCS) system, in which a game engine is one of four subsystems, that permits the involvement of various stakeholders with nonengineering backgrounds, such as nurses and physicians, in hospital design. The idea is tested on the project of designing a hospital in Taiwan and the results show that through the DVBCS design, misunderstandings and other issues stemming from poor communication between stakeholders are resolved, since the technology improves the communication between them. Hence, the decision-making in the project is also improved. Goulding et al. (2014) present a game environment supported by a W-based Virtual Reality cloud platform for integrated architecture engineering construction (AEC) projects, showing how co-located teams might make better decisions together through gamification.
Although research on increasing opportunities for solving problems in projects through gamification is scarce, there are indications that gamification could be used for this purpose.
5. Discussion and research agenda
The purpose of this paper was to analyze how gamification has been used to engage stakeholders in projects. The review has provided 41 examples of when and how stakeholders can be engaged in a variety of projects. Of these papers, 13 focused on engaging people, 6 on motivating action, 20 on promoting learning and 6 on solving problems. Three papers straddled two categories. This indicates that gamification is indeed used in a variety of ways for stakeholder management in projects; by providing the means for creating broader stakeholder inclusion, by inspiring them, by interacting with them and by encouraging them to engage in various collaborative endeavors. Judging from the articles, it can be concluded that gamification does provide an opportunity to go beyond not only the management of stakeholders but also the management for stakeholders (Freeman, 2010; Freeman et al., 2007).
But although the articles found do lend support to the idea of using gamification to enhance stakeholder engagement, this support is still rather weak. Not many articles were found, and it appears that most of the research that has been done so far has been in specific disciplines (e.g. computer science or construction), with few interconnections. The research designs are mainly experimental, meaning that the theoretical development is lagging, and so far, the interest has been limited primarily to how to promote learning in stakeholders.
Furthermore, the evidence as to whether the effects of gamification on engaging people in projects, motivating action or solving project-related problems, however, is inconclusive, and in some cases, it seems as if problem-solving, for example, occurred as a secondary effect of stakeholder engagement. Consequently, this means that little is known about the long-term effects of gamification on the engagement of project stakeholders.
These limitations lead us to the conclusion that there is a need for more research on how and under what conditions gamification can be used to improve stakeholder engagement. In the following, we outline four aspects that we believe future research should take into account when studying gamification for stakeholder engagement: the need to listen to users, the need for other and more rigorous research designs, the need to understand that gamification may be hidden and the need for cross-disciplinary studies.
5.1 The need to listen to stakeholders when gamifying
When gamifying project work, it would seem to be of the utmost importance that the stakeholders concerned have a say in how gamification should best be implemented and used. This is important, since many people today, both in and outside the project, have demanding work situations. Moreover, as Bateman (2018) puts it:
If we want a world where work could be more playful, we cannot begin by simply layering mandatory challenges upon an already demanding work situation. Instead, we must begin by challenging the cultural dominance of sport-like and task-like aesthetics for games and play, and endeavoring to overcome the underlying fears that prevent work from being played (Bateman, 2018, p. 1201).
It should thus be remembered that gamification does not have an inherent value in itself; instead, it is and should be about helping and supporting people. Gamification must not become an instrument of inhuman managerialism of projects, but must rely on trust (Landers et al., 2018), in which humans are recognized as playful creatures – as “homo ludendus”:
A chief source of motivation and enjoyment in play is the sense of autonomy and self-determination flowing from doing something for its own sake. When play is made mandatory or has outer serious concerns and consequences attached to it, people quickly experience it as other-determined, thwarting autonomy, motivation, enjoyment, and any sense of play (Deterding, 2019, p. 133).
This quotation highlights the challenge of gamifying stakeholder involvement in projects, and the need to gamify wisely. To support such aims, further research might aim to answer the following questions:
How do different stakeholders respond to (different) gamification elements? How may inclusion through gamification be measured?
What gamification elements could be used to engage stakeholders to interact more among themselves, as opposed to interacting with the project team?
What do project members and stakeholders think of gamification post-implementation? How does their experience affect the implementation of gamification tools and the outcome of the gaming itself?
How might gamification of projects be done so as to ensure that “cybervirtue” is recognized; that is, the ideal in which the relationship between humans and nonhumans is marked by positive qualities (Bateman, 2018)? In a world of social acceleration and techno-stress (La Torre et al., 2019; Rosa, 2015), these questions are highly relevant.
5.2 The need for other (rigorous) research designs
So far, research on stakeholder involvement in projects through gamification has been conducted primarily from the point of view of a postpositive epistemology in which reality, and social reality in particular, is seen as measurable and knowable (albeit sometimes messy and therefore difficult to access Landers et al., 2018). While such an epistemological view has its merits, it does, however, limit the research designs to experimental designs, such as the design and testing of prototypes. Based on this, we would argue that there is a need for other research designs that unpack the consequences of and experiences related to gamification. Ethnographies, for example, could be performed to unpack the effects of gamification in general, as well as of specific gamification elements; and larger interview studies or surveys, in which stakeholders are asked to provide their views on the effects of gamification on their relationship to the project, could be performed. Examples of questions that could be addressed through other research designs include:
How does gamification relate to how stakeholders perceive projects?
How do the stakeholders in a project interact in practice with an implemented gamification element? How is this interaction experienced?
How do different categories of stakeholders respond to gamification?
Are there differences between industries when it comes to the use and effects of gamification in projects? What do these differences look like?
How does the implementation of gamification elements in projects affect the daily practices of project members and stakeholders?
5.3 The need for cross-disciplinary studies
The fact that the study of the gamification of project work is an immature field of scientific inquiry, taking place mainly in a few industries, and from an engineering perspective, indicates that there is a need for cross-disciplinary studies. This is especially true in the post-digital world that we live in today, in which digital technologies have become an unquestioned and interwoven part of human activity (Cramer, 2015; Reeves, 2019). Although only those with specialist knowledge – software developers, graphic designers and some engineers – can understand and question the inner workings of digital technologies (Finn, 2018; O'Neill, 2016), social scientists, managers, project managers and others who possess other types of relevant knowledge could, and should, also be involved in order to help shed light on psychological, social and managerial aspects related to the gamification of project work.
In order to complement current research, we would argue that there is a need for cross-disciplinary studies and theoretical approaches in which engineering scholars of various types join forces with social scientists, and particularly project management scholars, to study the consequences of gamification on project work. Examples of questions that could be addressed through cross-disciplinary studies include:
What are the effects on different stakeholders and stakeholder groups, when gamification elements such as competition and rewards are introduced, and how may these be mitigated?
How may gamified projects and project work be retheorized?
How do gamification and “gamifying work” relate to how we understand the workings of the temporary organization?
How is power (re-)distributed among stakeholders in projects when gamification elements are introduced?
5.4 The need to understand that gamification may be hidden
Just because the number of papers dealing with the gamification of project work is fairly low, this does not mean that gamification is not relevant to increased stakeholder engagement. On the contrary, as Finn (2018) argues, gamification elements have been built into a wide variety of contemporary algorithms. It may thus be that gamification is masked in technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. In addition, as described briefly above, gamification principles are also inherent in various managerial methods common in projects today, such as agile methodologies and design thinking. Perhaps the fundamental ideas of gamification have become common to the extent that we no longer react to them.
There is thus a need to understand how gamification is “hidden” to the researcher interested in studying the gamification of project work. Examples of questions that could be addressed include:
In what technologies and managerial methods (such as agile methods) is gamification embedded and how?
What gamification principles are the most common in contemporary project work, and with which effects?
How are stakeholders engaged in projects without gamification? What difference can we discern between using and not using gamification?
6. Concluding remark
In light of the further development of digital technology, engaging stakeholders in projects in novel ways is becoming increasingly interesting. Not only can gamification involve individual stakeholders, it can also promote cooperative activity (Riar et al., 2022). Based on the synthesized overview of the state of the art when it comes to the gamification of projects for stakeholder involvement, in this project, we have provided some suggestions for further studies and hope to see more and broader research on the topic in the future.
Funding: This work was financed by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (grant 2016-07210) and Wallander scholarship fund (grant W19-0034).
