Response to “Designing Gamification in the Right Way”

This is a research paper about designing gamification in the right way. Most people are not familiar with gamification, but the author discusses this topic clearly. He did a good job both in structure and content.

Above all, the paper has a logical structure. First of all, it introduces the research problem briefly. Then, it states the problem following five subheadings step by step. Finally, the paper ends with a short conclusion. The paper shows a research process: coming up with a problem first, then analyzing and solving it.

       The content is concise and the author avoids using subjective words. As long as there is a statement, there are examples or references to support it. For instance, when the author refers to the user type, he cites Bartle’s player types and Marczewski’s gamification user types. In contrast to Neuhaus’s article we read last time, their types of references are different. Neuhaus analyzes a sitcom, so most of her examples come from that sitcom directly. However, to research on gamification, the author is likely to search for a great quantity of written contents. Also, for Neuhaus, she talks about The Simpsons subjectively because the topic can be interpreted freely. But for Bohyun Kim, his topic is designing gamification in the right way, unlike interpreting literature, his paper needs to be more scientific. Therefore, his arguments are supposed to be based on experiments or theories.

       After reading Kim’s paper, I not only learn gamification but also how to write a research paper. If we choose different topic, the way of doing research and writing is different.