GaML - A Modeling Language for Gamification

Gamification has become a trend over the last years, especially in non-game environments such as business systems. With the aim to increase the users´ engagement and motivation, existing or new information systems are enriched with game design elements. Before the technical implementation, the gamification concept is created. However, creation of such concepts is an informal and error-prone process, i.e., the definition and exchange of game mechanics is done in natural language or using spreadsheets. This becomes especially relevant, if the gamification concept is handed over to the implementation phase in which IT-experts have to manually translate informal to formal concepts without having gamification expertise. In this paper, we describe a novel, declarative, and formal domain-specific language to define gamification concepts. Besides that the language is designed to be readable and partially write able by gamification experts, the language is automatically compilable into gamification platforms without involving IT-experts.