Leaderboards: A Social Game Element (Part II)

 http://csi.softwareadvice.com/gamification-preventing-support-agent-burnout-1022112/

Another paper presented at Gamification 2013 shows how to use a leaderboard to improve behaviour change (see this previous post Leaderboards: A Social Game Element). 

The paper, Time's Up: Studying Leaderboards For Engaging Punctual Behaviour (João Costa, Rina Renee Wehbe, James Robb and Lennart E. Nacke) studies the use of a leaderboard for improving punctuality of participants to regular work meetings. Again, the authors conclude that leaderboards are more effective if they are used as a social game mechanic. They conducted an experiment where data were collected from 28 participants, members of the Laboratory of Games And Media Entertainment Research (GAMERLab). The arrival times to meetings of laboratory members were recorded for nine meetings.

Concerning the different kinds of leaderboads, discussed in the previous post, the leaderboard in this experiment was a multiplayer leaderboard, ranking high performance peers.

These are the authors' main conclusions:

"Our study showed that leaderboards do give way to positive social behaviours like social comparisons, which were of great importance to the majority of the participants, in particular to assess their improvement or standing in comparison to those who were of their interest, as opposed to assessing themselves in the global panorama of punctuality.
In conclusion, our study shows the possibility of gamifying meetings to improve the punctuality of the work group. This can help individuals project a better self-image, keep on task and increase their productivity."

The paper is available in the conference proceedings.