Abstract for:System Thinking for Gamification Design

The work in progress is a draft for an article that discusses how System Thinking can be used as a tool to develop and teach gamification. This article uses material gather form courses at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences at the Department of Game Development in 2017 and 2018. System Thinking is used to understand and design the gamification cases, and to simulate and predict what results to expect from the users of the gamification application. After brainstorming a gamification idea, the students conduct System Analyses on the idea; they make a clear question on what they want to achieve, they discuss the boundaries of the system, they make Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD) and flowcharts and Reference Behavior Patterns (RPB). System Dynamics models are then built to simulate the case and the tasks in the application as well as to predict outcomes. For System Dynamics we use ISEE Systems Stella Architect to do the simulations. The teaching methodology is based on problem based learning (PBL). The students works in groups with the teachers as tutors, and to a large extent they decide on what is necessary to study to solve the cases.