Exploring RE Knowledge for Gamification: Can RE Achieve a High Score?

Gamification is receiving more and more attention by researchers and practitioners who want to motivate people to participate in various software-supported tasks. Although its promising nature, there is the risk that many gamified software applications will fail. This is also caused by missing guidelines and methods, which support a structured development of gamified systems. Researchers investigating gamification recommend using iterative design and development approaches which focus on early prototypes. The proposed approaches are based on ideas from various disciplines, but seem to neglect requirements and software engineering knowledge. We argue that successfully gamifying software applications can benefit from existing processes, concepts, methods and tools available and applied in requirements engineering (RE). In this paper, we present our idea on how RE knowledge can stimulate and support the successful development of gamified software applications. We present a method, which makes use of RE knowledge and allows to bridge stakeholders' goals, intended behavior and experience. We illustrate our method on a use case about a tool-supported collaborative prioritization task. The contribution of our paper are first ideas on how to use RE knowledge to successfully apply gamification to software-supported tasks.