A gamification framework for the long-term engagement of smart citizens

Gamification of E-Participation: A Literature Review

“…The implementation stage of policy-making appears the most researched, with 20 manuscripts focused on it. In this stream of research, we observe a significant focus on the creation of "good citizens" [2,18,34,88]. While this direction of research could be of significant societal benefit, as no one can hardly argue that encouraging the use of sustainable transport is undesirable in most societies, it raises concerns in the literature on the ethics of employing gamification in e-participation and in governmental dealings in general [28,41].…”

“…Research in this direction should hence be cautioned. It is often observed that actual involvement from the government in gamified e-participation research is lacking [13,23,34,35,39,42,54,60,62,67,70,72,77]. That could be due to the lack of easy channels of contact between researchers and governments.…”

“…User rankings, levels & leaderboards [8,9,13,17,20,22,31,34,35,39,42,47,57,63,70,74,75,76,77,78,83,86,87] 23 Stories, characters [20,34,54,62,80] 5…”

“…Notifications [17,20,53,64] 4 Goals, missions, todos, quests, tasks, challenges [8,9,17,22,23,34,53,54,57,64,69,70,71,72,74,75,76,77,78,80,86] 21 Feedback [17,71,72] 3…”

“…Some of the most commonly utilized elements of gamification in these contexts have been: points, badges and leaderboards amongst others [27,37,44,50,51,65,84]. Gamification of e-participation, in particular has been observed to induce increased citizen engagement with the government as is intended from its introduction to e-participation [8,9,11,18,20,22,31,34,35,38]. Gamified e-participation is, however, often misunderstood in practice, implicating its potential for success [4,28].…”