Maximilian Altmeyer

Audio is a fundamental design component in crafting lively, immersive game worlds and gamified systems. Implemented through sound effects and music, it can enhance narratives and emotions in storytelling and provide dynamic feedback. Despite its central role, empirical findings on the impact of audio on performance, behavioral and experiential outcomes seem mixed and a structured overview depicting the current state-of-the-art in the field of gameful systems is lacking, yet required to understand when and how audio works. Therefore, we conducted a scoping review targeting audio interventions in games and gamification with a focus on implementations, measurements and reported effects. Across 119 publications, we identified a broad range of audio manipulations, study and intervention designs, as well as reported evidence. We found that effects vary across audio, game and outcome types, and that the evidence base in the domain of gamification remains comparatively sparse. With this review we contribute a systematic overview of prior experiments, map reported evidence to user performance, behavior and experience, and identify potentially moderating factors in audio effectiveness. This advances current methodological knowledge in the field and represents a first step towards a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying audio effectiveness.

Players often engage with video games maldaimonically—pursuing self-realization and self-expression through egocentric, destructive, exploitative, or otherwise harmful activities. Despite its recognition as a meaningful and cross-cultural experiential construct in games, no established instrument currently exists to measure the motivations associated with maldaimonic play. To address this gap, we developed the Inventory on Maldaimonic Motivations in Player Experiences (IMPEX) to assess player motivations as expressed through maldaimonic gaming activities. Following established scale development procedures, we conducted four iterative item development and initial validation studies, resulting in a 33-item, multidimensional scale encompassing eudaimonic motives, hedonic motives, malicious power-seeking, escapism, transgressive autonomy, social ambition, and extrinsic pursuits. We found initial support for understanding maldaimonic game experiences as involving established motivational dimensions and maldaimonic dimensions like malicious power-seeking, thereby extending current frameworks of player motivation.

Meditation can enhance mental well-being, but practicing meditation regularly can be challenging. In this work, we present SoulGarden - a gamified, web-based meditation app that draws on the narrative of personal growth, a guiding avatar and several progress-related mechanics to increase users' enjoyment in meditation and thereby enhance their meditation habits, mindfulness, and mental well-being. We conducted a within-subjects field study spanning four weeks (N=30) in which we evaluated the effectiveness of SoulGarden by comparing it to a non-gamified version and baseline measures. Our results show users meditated a lot using SoulGarden and the addition of gamification increased user enjoyment, frequency of meditation, and mindfulness. Thus, we contribute evidence for the potential of gamification to increase engagement and enhance mindfulness in meditation practices, ultimately paving the way to more effective mental health interventions.

In gamification users show increased motivation and engagement towards tasks. So far, this effect has mostly been empirically tested based on the visual depiction of game elements, while research on the use and addition of auditory aspects is sparse. In this work we investigate the effect of different modalities of game elements (auditory, visual, audiovisual) on user experience, perception and performance in a gamified image-tagging task. We approached this via an online validation survey to find suitable sound effects (N=50), a main quantitative study (N=109) and a qualitative semi-structured interview (N=9). Our results show that while visual gamification increases performance, auditory and audiovisual gamification had no effect. However, they were shown to have an influence on the user's flow state. Our qualitative follow-up study shed light on underlying reasons and revealed each modality has its own drawbacks and advantages and that combining both visual and auditory aspects was preferred by participants.