Technical Question & Answering (Q&A) websites have become promising sources of information for a wide range of topics and the most popular is Stack Overflow. Aiming to attract the continuous users’ interest, Stack Overflow enabled the gamification system. By rewarding users’ participation and contribution to the community, the site provides motivation to increase their participation. A well-known gamification process is the badge awards. In this paper, we propose a methodology to model and analyze the effect of the badge award gamification process on user’s personality traits based on data recorded before and after award time, employing the Big Five personality Factors. Using statistical univariate analysis and mainly multivariate cluster analysis, we show that: (1) On the average, users’ personality scores for each one of the individual personality traits are not significantly affected by the badge award; (2) When personality traits are considered together as multivariate data, there are clusters of users, each one characterized by different scores of traits. The comparison of clusters before and after the badge award shows that the badges favor changes from conservative to more open-minded and eager for new knowledge personality profiles; (3) The effect of the badge on user personality profiles is different for different activity groups, characterized by reputation, number of given and accepted answers. The results of the proposed methodology can assist to model and understand better the effect of gamification for technical users. Additionally, other similar Q&A sites can use these results to adopt or improve gamification tools. Furthermore, the proposed clustering methodology can be used as a generic framework for simulating and predicting user behavior in collaborative communities using gamification mechanisms.

技术问答网站（Q＆A）已成为各种主题的有前途的信息资源，其中最受欢迎的是Stack Overflow。为了吸引连续用户的兴趣，Stack Overflow启用了游戏化系统。通过奖励用户的参与和对社区的贡献，该网站提供了增加其参与度的动力。徽章奖是著名的游戏化过程。在本文中，我们提出了一种方法，该方法利用奖励五次个性因素，根据奖励时间前后记录的数据对徽章奖励游戏化过程对用户人格特征的影响进行建模和分析。使用统计单变量分析和主要的多元聚类分析，我们表明：（1）平均而言，徽章奖励不会显着影响每个人格特质中每个用户的人格分数；（2）当将人格特质与多变量数据一起考虑时，就会有一群用户，每个人都有不同的特质分数。徽章授予前后的聚类比较表明，徽章倾向于从保守转变为思想开放，并渴望获得新的知识人格特征。（3）对于不同的活动组，徽章对用户个性配置文件的影响是不同的，其特征是声誉，给出的和接受的答案的数量。拟议方法的结果可以帮助建模和更好地理解游戏化对技术用户的影响。此外，其他类似的问答 网站可以使用这些结果来采用或改进游戏化工具。此外，所提出的聚类方法可以用作使用游戏化机制在协作社区中模拟和预测用户行为的通用框架。