Gamification in Disc Golf : Using Gamification to Improve Disc Golf User Experience

Sammanfattning: Gamification is at its core a way to make a serious task more fun. This paper examines the potential use of gamification within the sport of disc golf and tries to determine whether a gamified variant of the sport can increase fun and improve the disc golf user experience. In practice, this meant creating and testing a gamified disc golf concept with the product's end-users, in other words, disc golfers.    The method used in creating the gamified disc golf concept was the Lean UX Cycle, consisting of the three stages think, make, and check. Working through two full cycles of the three stages, a mobile application was realized on which the concept was built around and used for playing.  The resulting gamified concept, named Disc Golf Party (DGP), was tested in one lo-fi and one hi-fi variant. The tests resulted in lots of laughter, and the common denominator seemed to be that the participants were having fun. From the group interviews held at the end of each test, mastery seemed to be the biggest motivational factor for regular disc golf. This, in turn, lead to the participants realizing that the fun factor in disc golf was heavily related to them actually playing well. From the user tests of DGP, it was clear that the participants were having fun, even when not not playing well. This indicated that DGP could be more fun in some sense when the player is looking to play more of a casual round. Even though several participants agreed that they were having more fun playing DGP, not a single participant expressed that they preferred DGP over regular disc golf.