Inclusive Gamified Participation: Who are we inviting and who becomes engaged?

Abstract

Recent evaluations have shown that up until now, e-participation platforms have not been very effective in involving citizens in public decision-making. This is partly due to these novel forms of engagement not seeming to reach citizens beyond the "usual suspects" of public participation. A trending approach to make these platforms more attractive, especially for less involved social groups, is to incorporate game-like elements. This research investigates the influence of demographical variables on participation and motivation when using a mobile gamified participation application. Our results show that participation was affected by age. The data further suggests that youth is both interested in urban planning and welcomes mobile participation forms, whereas older individuals feel less invited by novel technologies and engage less. Yet, older individuals and those less enthusiastic about games were not entirely put off by the included game elements.

Gamifying Decision Support Systems to Promote Inclusive and Engaged Urban Resilience Planning

“…Moreover, there was a lack of DSSs with a community design focus that would allow users to interact with and augment the private and public green spaces in their neighborhoods. The implementation of Utilizing technology (VR or augmented GAME4CITY reality [AR]) Ikigailand (Bhardwaj et al, 2020) Facilitating community discussions Community Circles (Thiel et al, 2019) Promoting continued engagement Land.Info Rewards-based incentives Cool Choices (Ro et al, 2017) Diversity of participants Global Sustainability Crossroads (Capellán-Pérez et al, 2019) Education Socialized learning GAIA Challenge (Mylonas, Hofstaetter, et al, 2021;Mylonas, Paganelli, et al, 2021) Providing players with informed Maladaptation Game (Asplund et al,…”

Using Citizen Science to Complement IoT Data Collection: A Survey of Motivational and Engagement Factors in Technology-Centric Citizen Science Projects

“…Feedback is also highlighted as one of the key motivational factors for CS projects [43,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53]56,57,[61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76]. Feedback could be provided to users in many forms such as impromptu acknowledgement of the report or data, status or updates on the issues or reports, the outcome of the report or data, how the data are being used, how useful have the data been and how their contribution affected the cause, services or research as part of a CS project [26].…”

“…For citizens' engagement, being part of a community is very important and the project platform must aim to make the participant feel integral to a community [55]. It plays a vital role in driving motivation in any intended local issues and causes [28][29][30]46,57,61,68,69].…”

“…Trust in terms of privacy in the use of the data provided by citizens is one of the potential barriers in engaging citizens to use CS applications. For achieving a broad and inclusive engagement, trust is the most important factor [68]. One of the studies showed that around 76% of participants rated the trust as one of the main participatory factors [59].…”

“…One of the studies showed that around 76% of participants rated the trust as one of the main participatory factors [59]. In addition, generating the belief and understanding the value of their contribution is also a key factor [48,50,53,59,61,68,74,108,109]. "Why engage in a CS project when citizens start believing that nothing is going to change?"…”