Gamification of Discussoo: An Online AI-Based Forum for Serious Discussions

Engagement in the discussion process is one of the common challenges of asynchronous online forums. It becomes especially crucial if the discussion is organized over a serious topic about a complex problem with a group of diverse stakeholders. Gamification gives much promise in addressing this challenge. In this paper, we propose possible game design solutions to the engagement challenge for an existing online AI-based platform Discussoo and reflect on the results from the expert interviews and an experiment with students