Playful Campaigning

Abstract

While gamification is becoming an increasingly popular tool in HCI, it is often criticized for not being meaningful. In this work, we present a new approach: narrative-oriented gamification, applied in the context of environmental conservation. A biodata-driven game experience was developed to raise awareness during an environmental non-governmental organization (NGO) event at a music festival. The NGO representatives developed narratives, tailored to each potential outcome of the game, which encouraged participants to immediately reflect on the broader environmental issues and take action. In this paper we present the findings from this work suggesting that this form of gamification, predicated on narrtives and reflection, can be a powerful tool for creating engagement with, and raising public awareness of, environmental issues.

Gamification of Sustainable Consumption: a systematic literature review

“…The development, testing and monitoring of mobile applications (apps) seems to be the most common mean for implementing gamification towards individual sustainable consumption (37 publications). Also, games, both digital and analog, as well as "other" non-app solutions [42,64], are representing the existing understanding about ways that gamification can reach out to different consumer groups. The one mean of implementation that was largely missing from the papers were wereable technologies, an omission that could be connected to the type of solutions explored in the papers of the study since weareables have been in the agenda of gamification [91,92] and of sustainable lifestyles for quite some time, particularly for health [93,94].…”

“…This result presents itself as an opportunity to further explore the impacts of immersive technologies for shifting consumption practices, a field that is currently emerging [107]. Immersive elements, for which technological devices may not be needed, such as role play, personaled stories, images and narratives, were also present, mainly as conduits of empathy [64,83,84] needed to generate positive engagement, willingness to cooperate with other participants and interact with nature.…”

“…The large majority of papers had the intention to motivate different behaviors or learning more about them, in many instances specifying these behaviors in the context of one or two of the other focus areas (user experience, social practice, environmental impacts), thus providing discussion points such as the relevance of infrastructure to make individual consumption shifts possible [58,69,79,88]. In terms of practice theory, behavior belongs to the pillar of "body", although various of the analyzed papers touch upon psychological conditions and cognitive processes, none of them addresses the topic as a direct outcome in terms of intention or impact, rather as part of the theory behind gamification [52,55,64,66,73] or a component of a larger model [82]. This could be explained by the way that this study was designed, as the targeted literature illustrates gamification in consumption areas with a relatively smaller body of research than energy or health.…”