Gamification and Motivation




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 games do, and consequently, attempting to affect user behavior.” The authors note that “In recent years, popularity of gamification has skyrocketed” and go on to offer a review of gamification research.

The introduction first outlines the historical development of video games, and then moves on to note some of the areas to which gamification has been applied since its emergence in 2010. These include commerce, education, health, exercise, marketing and advertising, and environmental behaviour.
The last of these is of particular interest in the context of this post.

Some key experiences in games play are enjoyment, flow, autonomy, mastery, and accomplishment. These can be harnessed in gamification and directed towards ends related to a different environment. “The potential of gamification lies in the restructuring of tasks and activities with game elements and gameful affordances.” (Examples of affordances include challenges, levels, status bars, quizzes, competitions, avatars, role-play, virtual currency, etc.).Techniques include splitting tasks into sub-tasks, giving direct feedback on progress, re-framing tasks through narrative, and recruiting community support. Successful design can lead users to desirable psychological and behavioural outcomes.

The authors note the increasing frequency of publications on gamification and classify them according to various conceptual schemes. 462 publications are classified as empirical, non-empirical, descriptive and conceptual, and divided into subject domains. The largest domain by far is Education/Learning, with 196 entries, whereas the domain most likely to be relevant to Community Energy is Ecological/environmental behavior with 18 entries. A critical analysis of the aspects of gamification studied in the various papers reviewed is presented, as is an agenda for future research.

The reviewers comment that “Encouraging communal engagement and cooperative activity is considerably less studied [than Education/Learning], but would provide an interesting potential avenue of research”.



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