Personality-targeted Gamification: A Survey Study on Personality Traits and Motivational Affordances

While motivational affordances are widely used to enhance user engagement in "gamified" apps, they are often employed en masse. Prior research offers little guidance about how individuals with different dispositions may react-positively and negatively-to specific affordances. In this paper, we present a survey study investigating the relationships among individuals' personality traits and perceived preferences for various motivational affordances used in gamification. Our results show that extraverts tend to be motivated by Points, Levels, and Leaderboards; people with high levels of imagination/openness are less likely to be motivated by Avatars. Negative correlations were found between emotional stability (the inverse of neuroticism) and several motivational affordances, indicating a possible limitation of gamification as an approach for a large segment of the population. Our findings contribute to the HCI community, and in particular to designers of persuasive and gamified apps, by providing design suggestions for targeting specific audiences based on personality.