Gamifying Connected Services Patterns

Gamification, defined as the application of game design principles in non-gaming contexts, is a powerful tool for making systems lastingly attractive by exhausting rewards as soon as specific conditions are met. In the context of online or real world shops, customers are sometimes rewarded for their loyalty via additional offers or services. These offers often incentivize users to consume additional services and goods. However, most of the time they are limited to a single or a small set of vendors, which raises the question of how customers can be motivated to use services of different domains and service providers. Furthermore, the lack of standardization and increasingly stringent data protection rules aggravate the exchange of business related data with other systems. This paper introduces two patterns. First, a way for increasing joint-marketing purposes is elaborated focusing on a buying behavior based rewarding approach. Second, an overlay for existing client-server systems is described whose purpose is to anonymize and share services in form of digital tokens across different service providers, their systems, and users. In summary, said patterns establish the context for incentivizing the usage of cross domain services.