Urban areas can be considered the ground for the challenges related to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The objective of shaping cities as human settlement that will see a more inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable future is often argued in literature as an issue dependent on behavioral change of inhabitants in urban areas. In this paper, the authors question if experimental applications based on gamification can co-produce more sustainable neighborhoods through an impact evaluation method that departs from individual choices within the complex of urban mobility. This investigation is carried out within MUV (Mobility Urban Values), an EU research and innovation project, which aims to trigger more sustainable urban mobility in six pilot cities. This article describes the critical method of validation, an impact assessment of the MUV experimental gamification in the pilot cities, in order to represent a proof for future urban strategies. This methodological approach is based on an evaluation structured on indicators of both impact and process suitable for urban contexts. As based on six pilot cities, with possibilities for transferability to other contexts and scalability to other cities, the method represents a reference work for the evaluation of similar experimental applications.Systems 2019, 7, 30 2 of 28 in changing their habits. Individuals rarely recognize their power to affect and improve the liveability of the context they inhabit as their own neighborhood/city/region/planet and as their own life. It is difficult, indeed, to believe in the 'butterfly effect' (i.e., our individual routines have an impact on an entire ecosystem), so that the causal link between every little change of daily routines can have an impact on a systemic dimension of the SDG as fundamental and relevant.With the attempt to enhance this awareness, studies on behavior change highlight gamification as an effective perspective [3]. Gamification is often defined as the process of game design elements that structure playful activities [4] on non-game contexts [5]. Game design elements are generally driven by a user-perspective that leads individual human personal motivation and/or perception to provide more effective, efficient, engaging, enduring, and entertaining experiences [6,7]. Points, ranks, levels, competitions, challenges, rewards, badges, or reputations are designed to keep users, as players, in the game [8]. Gamification has been much used as a tool for user-design products or services, but also in business with the purpose to motivate individual behavior change.Since the beginning of the XX century, psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers have studied the function of playing for human beings. Karl Groos in his "The play of man" [9], besides acknowledging that the instinct of playing has deep physiological bases, also argued that "play" has a fundamentally social function: it offers to humans (and animals) a tool to mastery those activities that bring prosperity for their species. Later in time, Ber...
