APPLYING GAMIFICATION ELEMENTS TO AN ONLINE CASINO PLATFORM

Sammanfattning: Gamification is one of the most effective ways of creating and keeping high engagement among people. It is a deep exploration into what makes a game fun and how to apply those fun and engaging elements in real-life productive activities. The average lifetime of a player in online casinos is not long within iGaming, players tend to play very few times and they never come back. Even if a player has a specific favorite game, they can many times find the same game on other sites. The lack of interaction between friends within iGaming could be a reason for a player to easily go elsewhere. The increase of streaming of iGaming is a strong indicator that there are many that like to socialize over a common interest such as iGaming. This thesis provides a study of gamification in collaboration with the casino domain. It presents the basic concepts of gamification, that someone might need to implement, in order to examine if gamification elements have a positive or negative effect in the casino. Initially, the project focused on how to invite an existing player into another’s user social network and then how to elaborate and introduce gamification techniques. The development was iterative in 3 cycles, each one of approximately 3 weeks. At the end of each iteration, changes were implemented according to the feedback from the development team. The evaluation was conducted with 15 users, some of them were experienced and some others were not. Results found that the user using the gamified version was more engaged and using gamification elements can indeed achieve high engagement.