Community Energy Literature Review

A serious game about air quality, carbon and health. Earlier posts have taken as their subjects Gamification and Motivation and Gamification and domestic energy consumption . This post looks at a particular game, ClairCity Skyline s and its context, as described in ClairCity Project: citizen-led scenarios to improve air quality in European cities. by Enda Hayes et al. (2018), Air Pollution XXVI pp. 233 – 241. Open access: https://www.witpress.com/elibrary/wit-transactions-on-ecology-and-the-environment/230/36761 The ClairCity Project is concerned with air pollution particularly in major cities; Bristol, Amsterdam, Ljubljana, Sosnowiec, Aveiro and Liguria (Genova) are piloting it. The project aims to create a “major shift in public understanding towards the causes of poor air quality, inviting citizens to give their opinions on air pollution and carbon reduction policies to shape the cities of the future.” The game ClairCity Skylines is one of the me...

A previous post referred to a review by Jonna Koivistoa and Juho Hamaria which covered a wide spectrum of papers on gamification. The following review has a much narrower focus, closer to the central topic of this blog. Gamification and serious games within the domain of domestic energy consumption: A systematic review. Johnson, Daniel; Horton, Ella; Mulcahy, Rory; & Foth, Marcus; Queensland University of Technology (2017) Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, 73, pp. 249-264. The authors refer at the outset to “the urgent need to consider new approaches to motivating individuals to become more energy aware and to translate this knowledge into action.” From a search of 2831 articles, 26 were selected as most suitable for study. These are based on 25 primary studies reporting empirical data on the value of gamification and serious games on energy consumption. There is increasing interest in these tools “to motivate, engage and educate people regarding energy cons...

Community Energy workers are typically interested in motivating members of the public to take action in areas such as energy conservation and the adoption of renewable energy supplies.  Gamification has been considered as a method of informing and motivating its users in a variety of fields, and a brief description of a recent paper reviewing gamification in general follows. Readers may conclude that gamification could be usefully applied to Community Energy, as a method of increasing public engagement, and further posts on this topic are planned. The rise of motivational information systems: A review of gamification research by Jonna Koivistoa and Juho Hamaria, Gamification Group, Faculty of Information Technology and Communications, Tampere University International Journal of Information Management 45, 2019 (Open access) The abstract defines the topic: “Gamification refers to designing information systems to afford similar experiences and motivations as g...