Game Over? A Review of Gamification in Information Retrieval

We present a systematic literature review of gamification in information retrieval, identifying 32 peer-reviewed articles spanning a period from 2012 to present day. Our study highlights that, with the exception of crowdsourcing relevance judgments, very few studies have investigated the application of gamification to search systems. Moreover, in articles that we would strictly define as being related to gamification (i.e. not games with a purpose or serious games), a majority did not present any real-world systems, user studies or empirical results. In numerous other fields, gamification has been used to successfully increase user engagement and productivity. We argue that the potential of gamification has been overlooked in information retrieval and, in particular, in interactive search settings. We conclude by discussing experimental obstacles and the potential benefits of evaluating gamification strategies in future interactive search systems.