Manuscript received October 25, 2022; revised November 16, 2022; accepted December 9, 2022.
Abstract—Gamification, a concept originally derived from
games, is defined as the extraction and inclusion of game
mechanics within ordinary activities. Applying gamification to
the educational context had surged over the past decade due to
the recognition of the potential in motivating, promoting
engagement, and enhancing student performance. The current
study sought to overcome three dilemmas, including gamified
depths, online gamification, and interaction, when gamifying
the online learning environment through game theory, which
investigates the arising conflict and collaboration among logical
and intelligent decision-makers. This study used learning
analytics based on the qualitative data collected from 57
undergraduates from the School of Educational Studies by
exposing the students to gamified and non-gamified e-learning
environments throughout eight weeks. By scrutinising the
online gamification dilemma as a sequential game, the perfect
equilibrium or Nash equilibrium at each subgame can be
achieved using backward induction with synchronous online
shallow gamification (4,6) and asynchronous online shallow
gamification (3,5) as the optimal outcome. Hence, shallow
gamification would allow players’ payoff maximization even
when the asynchronous approach was selected, compared to
asynchronous deep gamification.
Index Terms—Dilemma, education, gamification, game
theory
The authors are with the Centre for Instructional Technology, Universiti
Sains Malaysia, Gelugor, Malaysia.
*Correspondence: mageswaran@usm.my (M.S.)
Cite: Darren Lim, Mageswaran Sanmugam*, and Wan Ahmad Jaafar Wan Yahaya, "Addressing the Dilemma of Online Gamification with Subgame Perfect Equilibria," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 757-762, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).