Second International Workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval (GamifIR’15)

Gamification is a popular methodology describing the trend of applying game design principles and elements, such as feedback loops, points, badges or leader boards in non-gaming environments. Gamification can have several different objectives. Besides just increasing the fun factor, these could be, for example, to achieve more accurate work, better retention rates and more cost effective solutions by relating motivations for participating as more intrinsic than conventional methods. In the context of Information Retrieval (IR), there are various tasks that can benefit from gamification techniques such as the manual annotation of documents in IR evaluation or participation in user studies to tackle interactive IR challenges. Gamification, however, comes with its own challenges and its adoption in IR is still in its infancy. Given the enormous response to the first GamifIR workshop at ECIR 2014 and the broad range of topics discussed it seemed timely and appropriate to organise a follow-up workshop.