情報処理学会 インタラクション 2021
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Improving conversations around controversial
issues with Gamification implemented
YONG-HAO HU†1,a) TATSUO NAKAJIMA†1,b)
Abstract: In this paper, we examine a method that introduces game mechanics into online conversations aroundcontroversial issues, aiming at investigating the influence of Gamification on these conversations. We examine the changes
in motivation and engagement of users participating in conversations with Gamification introduced, as well as theeffectiveness of conversations that Gamification brings. We observe positive influence on motivation and effectiveness but
little, as well as slightly negative effect on engagement, indicating that this method still needs improvement, as well as that
Gamification has potential to promote better conversations on controversial issues.

1. Introduction
People have been holding different positions, arguing with eachother about controversial social issues around the world.
However recently, due to the interaction with social media and‘disinformation’ such as fake news or political slanted
information, the phenomenon of political polarization becomes
more severe [1][2][3]. Moreover, as the internet technology
develops these days, communication becomes much easier than
before, which also results in more trolling and irrational
behaviors happening [4]; information is conveyed easier andfaster than ever, which doesn’t lead human to mutual
understanding but create countless ‘echo-chambers’ [1][3]. We
afraid that these factors above are tearing the society apart [2].
To solve this problem, several projects were found to match
people with different opinions and have them smoothly
communicate face to face, aiming at promoting mutual
understanding between citizens. These projects include Hi FromThe Other Sides (in the US), My Country Talks (from Germany),
etc [5][6][7].
Inspired by these projects, we started thinking that whether thesolution above is also realizable in online situations. In theseprojects, participants discuss with each other in person, and there
is a host controlling the situation, which help the conversations
move smoothly and effectively. In online situations however, thisis difficult to achieve since participants are not facing each otherin person, and there is no host controlling the conversation.
Here we consider Gamification as a potential mechanics to help
motivate the participants and control the flow of the online
conversation around controversial issues. Gamification, defined
as implemented game design elements in the design of non-gamesystems [8], has become a popular research topic these days.
In this paper, we propose a method to introduce Gamification
into online conversation around controversial issues. The purpose
is to investigate the influence of Gamification on participants’motivation, engagement, and the conversations’ effectiveness,
defined by how much understanding a participant has about†1

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Waseda
University, Shinjuku, Tokyo 169-8555, Japana) yonghao.hu@dcl.cs.waseda.ac.jpb) tatsuo@dcl.cs.waseda.ac.jp© 2021 Information Processing Society of Japanothers’ thought, as well as how much a participant changes in
his/her mind.
We conducted an experiment with our method, finding that our
method causes a slightly negative effect on engagement,
indicating that our method still needs improvement; meanwhile aslightly positive influence is also observed with regard to
motivation and effectiveness, proving the potential of
Gamification on improving conversations on controversial issues.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2
introduces related works and how our work is related to or
different from them. Section 3 explains the method we propose,as well as the experiment to inspect the effect of the proposed
method. Section 4 presents the result from the experiment, which
is discussed in Section 5. At last, Section 6 concludes the study
and points out the limitation and possible future works.

2. Related Work
We consider our work related to ‘conversation’ as well as‘engagement in public affair’, since we are dealing withconversation between citizens around controversial issues on thesociety. Currently, Gamification are mostly researched in the fieldof education [19], and it is also widely applied in fields likeworkplace or marketing [10][20], while we consider that ourwork is not categorized into any of these popular research or
application field.
Besides the fields mentioned above, despite less cases, there are
implementations of game mechanics on public affair recently.
Governments practice e-participation, participation of citizens inpublic affairs through digital devices, with Gamification
implemented to increase citizens’ engagement [21]; Grace et al.
developed and conducted a research on a serious game helping
train news audience’s ability to distinguish fake news [12], whichhave become a general and serious problem in current society;
Palacin-Silva et al. conducted a research on encouraging people
to engage more in environmental issue with the help of
Gamification [11]; Mironova et al. proposed a psychologicalboard game to help the adaptation of migrants in new countries[23]. These works express the possibility for Gamification to
improve problems in public affair, and we assume that thispossibility is also applicable on our work, which is related to
public affair as well but from a different aspect.

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Researches about Gamification or game mechanics
implemented in conversations have been conducted as well. Olivaet al. presents a serious game for improving communication but
in the context of promoting fire safety [9], instead ofcommunication of exchanging opinions that our work deal with;
Adachi et al.’s research targets Gamification implementation on
improving face-to-face multi-party conversation is conducted[22], while our work focuses on online one-on-one conversation.
Ding et al. propose five design guidelines to motivate users in
gamified asynchronous online discussion [28], including setting
clear expectations, allowing students to have a certain level ofautonomy, promoting students’ sense of competence, enrichinginteractions among students, and creating a safe environment for
low-profile students. Their work is conducted in the context of a
student learning platform, but the principle may also applicable to
our work.
Liu et al.’s study points out that engagement of users using asystem is improved with Gamification implemented, while
aspects other than engagement still depend more on the maincontent of the system itself, especially if game elements are
merely attached, instead of integrated, to the system [13]. We areaware of this advice and make attempts to integrate gamemechanics into our main content instead of a simple attachment.

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conversation.
Users share the same ‘points’ starting from 0, the higher the
better; here ‘Cooperation’ mechanics is realized with the‘Points’ interface, encouraging the users to try their best to
make the points as high as possible together.

A user presses a ‘Reasonable’ or ‘Accept’ button if he/shethinks what another user says is reasonable and acceptable,
and the points they share increase; here ‘Feedback’ and‘Rewards’ mechanics are realized with ‘Points’ element,
showing users that attempt to approve each other is
encouraged.

A user presses the ‘Calm down’ button if another user isbehaving irrationally, so that the points decrease, while thatuser is disabled to take any action for minutes; here
‘Feedback’ mechanics is realized with ‘Points’ and‘Locking/unlocking’ interface, offering the user some time
to calm down, preventing the user from becoming more
irrational.
At the end of a conversation, users leave comments andgive badges to each other; here ‘Feedback’, ‘Rewards’,‘Resource acquisition’ are realized with comments and‘Badges’ interface, giving users motivation to keep on next
conversations.

3. Methodology
3.1 Method
We refer to the Game Element Hierarchy [14] and suggest amethod that introducing several game mechanics into
conversations.

Cooperation: induce users to build a smooth conversation
together, in which participants are willing to interact
positively and remain rational.
Competition: stimulate users to engage more and behave
better in a conversation.
Feedback and Rewards: reflect how one behaves in aconversation, as well as encourage one to engage more andbehave better.
In order to provide a sample to implement our method, we build
a web chat app prototype. The mechanics mentioned above isrealized by corresponding game components, which is explained
along with the later explanation of the prototype. It is worth
noting that although game thinking and elements are used in the
prototype, the app itself is still a chat app, not a game app.
Therefore, our study is still in the range of ‘Gamification’, not‘Serious game’ [8][15].
3.2 Prototype
The web chat app is named “Let’s talk G”, made with ‘ReactJS’[16] and linked with ‘Firebase’ [17] as its real-time database. The
app consists of 3 pages: Chat page, User page, and Ranking page.
The following explains the functionality of each page, as well as
how the game elements are integrated.
Chat page, the place where users conduct conversations withtext messaging in the app, is the core component of our prototype.
Here explains the flow of a conversation in the Chat page, as wellas the game elements implemented in each situation of a

© 2021 Information Processing Society of Japan

Fig. 1. Chat pageFig. 2. Chat page - End of a conversation
Ranking page shows the ranking of total points each user
obtains in all conversations he/she participated. ‘Competition’mechanics is implemented with ‘Ranking’ interface here.

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effectiveness between two groups.

4. ResultFig. 3. Ranking page
User page shows a user’s profile, total points and total badges
the user obtains in all participated conversations. ‘Feedback’
mechanics works with ‘Points’ interface, while ‘Rewards’
mechanics works with ‘Badges’ interface.

The experiment explained in Section 2 was conducted on 8
participants, 4 males and 4 females. During the whole experiment,
despite different opinions, all participants conducted conversation
without behaving irrationally, in both Messenger and our
prototype; the ‘calm down’ button in our prototype has neverbeen used. 7 participants out of 8 have pressed a ‘Reasonable’ or‘Accept’ button during a conversation in our prototype and all the
8 participants have given feedback and badges to each other after
a conversation in our prototype, showing that the gamemechanics we prepared are noticed and effectively utilized.
Figure 5 shows the changes in participants’ willingness to attend
a conversation with our prototype compared with Messenger,
which is the indicator of changes in motivation that our methodbrings. The figure shows that 1 participant perceives much, 5perceive a little, and 2 perceive none.

Fig. 4. User page
3.3 Experiment
We first prepare several controversial social issues where people
hardly reach a consensus in normal discussions, including death
penalty, use of nuclear power, severity of climate change,
development of women rights, etc. Then we gather participants,
investigate their opinions on each issue with a questionnaire, andmatch participants with opposite answers to an issue on thequestionnaire. We ask the matched participants to discuss about
the issue where they disagree with each other. The experimentlasts for 4 days, while Messenger, representing other existing
main-stream chat app online, is used for the first 2 days, and our
prototype is used for the last 2 days. The matching of participantschanges every day, and no participants are aware of the real
identity of their conversation opponent.
In this experiment, the independent variable [18] is the platform
used to conduct conversations, including ‘Messenger’ and ‘Let’stalk G’, while the dependent variables [16] are listed below:

Motivation: Willingness to participate in the conversations,which is collected according to answers to thequestionnaire.

Engagement: Number of messages and total length ofmessages, which is calculated from data in database after
the experiment.

Effectiveness: Changing in understanding about others’
opinions after conversations, as well as changing in one
own mind after conversations, which is collected according
to answers to the questionnaire.
Data from participants using ‘Messenger’ is defined as thecontrol group, while data from participants using our prototype isdefined as the experiment group. This experiment aims at
examining the difference of motivation, engagement, and© 2021 Information Processing Society of Japan

Fig. 5. Changes in participants’ motivation to attend a
conversation with our method compared with Messenger
Figure 6 shows the changes in participants’ own mind about anissue after attending a conversation with our prototype comparedwith Messenger, which is one of the indicators of changes in
effectiveness of the conversations that our method brings. The
figure shows that 1 participant perceives much and 7 perceive
none.

Fig. 6. Changes in participants’ mind after having conversation
with our method compared with Messenger

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with our prototype – Case with Messenger): 238.363.
Figure 7 shows the changes in participants’ understanding aboutothers’ thought about an issue after attending a conversation with
our prototype compared with Messenger, which is one of theindicators of changes in effectiveness of the conversations that
our method brings. The figure shows that 1 participant perceives
much, 5 perceive a little, and 2 perceive none.

Fig. 7. Changes in participants’ understanding about others’
thoughts after having conversation with our method comparedwith Messenger
We also investigate participants preference between our
prototype and Messenger, whose result is shown in Figure 8. 4
participants feel no difference, 2 prefer our prototype, and 2
prefer Messenger

Fig. 8. Participants’ preference between our prototype andMessenger
Number and length of messages participants sent in out
prototype compared with those in Messenger, which is theindicator of changes in engagement that out method brings, arealso examined. The result is shown as follow:

Average of messages count difference (Case with our
prototype – Case with Messenger): -3.250.
Standard deviation of messages count difference (Case with
our prototype – Case with Messenger): 17.678.
Average of characters count difference (Case with our
prototype – Case with Messenger): -163.875.
Standard deviation of characters count difference (Case© 2021 Information Processing Society of Japan

5. Discussion
In this section, we inspect how much our method improves
conversations around controversial issues based on theexperiment result showed in Section IV.
5.1 Motivation and effectivenessWe observed only slight improvement in motivation andeffectiveness of conversations with our method compared withconversations on Messenger, and we came up with several
reasons as follows.
Firstly, it still needs improvement with implementation of
Gamification in our method. Gamification can be implemented invarious ways, so there is possibility that implementing
Gamification in other ways, beside our method, may bring more
influence on online conversation around controversial issues. C.
de Armas de Armas et al.’s work [25] examines the motivation
provided by each game element separately and lists the mosteffective elements, including some of the elements we integrated
in our method like Ranking, Medals, Feedback and Reward;
while Blocking activities, which is adopted in our method when auser behaves irrationally, is not considered effective enough toprovide motivation; Besides, Ranking element does motivate
users at higher places but at the same time demotivate users at
lower places [26], which we did not notice and improve in our
method.
Furthermore, we did not provide payments or other rewards tothe participants in our experiment, so those who were willing toattend the experiment might be holding enough motivation
already to conduct conversations with people having different
opinions, which results in the limited changes in motivation.
Despite the problems mentioned above, our method stillachieves a positive result although with little significance,
showing the potential of our method in improving motivation andeffectiveness of conversations around controversial issues.
5.2 Engagement
Slightly negative effect happens on engagement of users using
our prototype compared with using Messenger. We attribute thisnegative result to the complexity of our method and users’
unfamiliarity with our prototype, discouraging users to engage
with our method more. As indicated by Li et al. [24], gamedesigners should reduce game complexity and enhance gamefamiliarity in order to establish better user engagement in asoftware game. Li et al.’s work focuses on games instead of
non-game application with Gamification implemented, while weconsider their implication applicable on our case since both
works utilize game elements.
The adoption of Messenger in our experiment might haveinfluence as well. We adopted Messenger in order to have ourmethod compared with a rather general and existing case since
Messenger is one of a famous social network service and usedworldwide, while the comparison with such service might makethe unfamiliarity of users with our method more obvious.
In Alessandro and Franca’s work [27], although they found a
low correlation between usability and engagement in a long-term

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game context, they observed a temporal and local decrease inuser engagement with a usability problem happened, which might
be a reason of the negative result in our experiment since ourexperiment only lasted for several days. Results might change
and the negative effect on engagement of our method might be
improved if the experiment period was extended.
5.3 User experience
Although there is no direct relation to our main goals,
observation about user preference is also conducted, and we
found that our prototype ties with Messenger. We interpret thisresult as a success of our method being accepted by part of theusers as a new form of conversation, despite the unfamiliarity
with our prototype compared with current main-stream social
media.

6. Conclusion, limitations, and future works
The experiment with our method indicates the potential of
Gamification on improving users’ motivation and effectiveness of
conversations around controversial issues despite little
significance. In contrast, our method brings negative effect on
engagement, which is considered resulting from the complexity
and unfamiliarity users feel toward our method. Meanwhile, user
preference between our method and messenger ties, indicatingthat our method is accepted as an alternative form of
conversations.
For future researchers, we suggest at first that the approachshould be design simpler in case of disrupting the user experienceand causing negative effect on engagement. Loading too many
elements to a system is suggested to distract users [25].
Furthermore, the experiment in this paper only lasted for 4 days,
with only a short-term effect observed, so the experiment period
can be extended if inspecting long-term effect is considerednecessary. The decrease on engagement may also get alleviatedaccording to Alessandro and Franca’s work [27].
Recruitment of experiment participants is also recommended to
be improved. It would be better to recruit more users with lower
motivation, perhaps by providing payments or other rewards, sothat more significant changes in motivation may be observed.
Recruitment of users from more different countries or regions arealso recommended since citizens’ attitudes and cares towardsocial issues may alter between different places and cultures.
As mentioned in Section II, Ding et al. propose five designprinciples for gamified asynchronous online discussion: setting
clear expectations, allowing autonomy, competence, relatedness
with other users, and free expression for low-profile users [28].
Referring to this proposal, our work is lack of the enrichment
among users, so adding this need in future works may also
improve the motivation for users to engage in our method.
Last but not least, we suggest the possibility of generalization of
our method. In this paper, we examine the implementation of
Gamification on conversations around controversial issues, but amethod for other kinds of conversation, besides the related works
introduced in Section II, or even a method for conversations of
any context generally, is also recommended to be designed andexamined.

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