Title

Personalization in Serious Games as a Multidimensional Design Space: Lessons from In-the-Wild Studies

Abstract

Personalization is widely regarded as a key driver of engagement and impact in serious games and gamified systems, yet the term is often used loosely, covering everything from tailoring a narrative to adjusting difficulty in real time. This talk explores game personalization as a multidimensional design and research space, drawing on findings from in-the-wild studies across different application contexts.

We frame personalization along four dimensions, organized around two core questions. The first concerns what is personalized: its granularity, from designing for a target group or context, to clustering users by engagement, behavioral stage, or player type, to adapting to individual player characteristics; and its target, i.e., which elements of the game are personalized, including narrative, mechanics, dynamics, feedback, and rewards. The second concerns how personalization unfolds: its timing, whether it is set once at design time or continuously adjusted during play; and the player’s agency in the process, i.e., whether adaptation is system-driven, player-driven, or negotiated between the two.

Grounded in psychological models of behavior and motivation, and enabled by AI techniques for user modeling and adaptation, personalization is inherently transdisciplinary, drawing on HCI, AI, and behavioral and social sciences alike. Rather than treating this as a purely theoretical exercise, the talk grounds the framework in a series of in-the-wild studies, discussing what these studies reveal about the actual impact of personalization, where current approaches fall short, and where the open challenges lie.

Bio

Annapaola Marconi is a Senior Researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Italy, where she has led the Motivational Digital Systems (MoDiS) research unit since 2015. She received her Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technologies from the University of Trento in 2008.

Her research focuses on the design, development, and evaluation of motivational and persuasive digital systems that leverage gamification, gameful design, artificial intelligence, and behavioral analytics to foster user engagement, motivation, and positive behavior change. Her work aims to create personalized, data-driven digital interventions capable of supporting individuals and communities in addressing complex societal challenges.

She has coordinated and contributed to numerous national and European research and innovation projects, with a strong emphasis on translating scientific advances into real-world solutions with measurable societal impact. Her research spans several application domains, including education, where she develops engaging learning experiences and digital tools for addressing sensitive social topics; environmental sustainability, through technologies that promote sustainable mobility, pro-environmental behaviors, and citizen participation in the green transition; and resilient societies, by designing digital solutions that strengthen civic engagement, inclusion, awareness, and community resilience.

Annapaola has authored numerous scientific publications in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, gamification, intelligent systems, and behavior change technologies. She actively promotes interdisciplinary research, collaborating with academia, public institutions, industry, and civil society to transform cutting-edge research into innovative digital solutions that improve people’s quality of life and contribute to a more sustainable and resilient future.