Context to Culture for Gamification HCI Requirements: Familiarity and Enculturement

Abstract

This chapter outlines the principles of context and culture in the discipline of human computer interaction (HCI) for the purpose of good design in gamification. The important HCI theory of affordance is used to illustrate context and culture, and their importance in the design of artefacts, in this case games for education and business. We then consider how these concepts are incorporated into the game design through appropriate requirements engineering, utilising familiarity and enculturement. Familiarity—tied to learning within the ecological perspective of context—and enculturement—tied to the socialisation within the perspective of culture. It is argued that requirements engineering and analysis needs to take into account the dualistic nature of system interaction related to these HCI concepts, of being of both culture and context, rather than the common, somewhat muddled, perspective of a context mediated by a cultural perspective, or vice versa, or a conglomeration of the two.