Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

The objective of this essay has been to shine a light on processes where games have been used to facilitate citizen engagement in the planning process. Traditional participatory processes, such as public meetings, often suffer from not being able to foster motivation within a diverse group of citizens. Electronic participation, defined as the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s) within citizen participation, has been seen as a method to prevent some of the hurdles present in conventional citizen participation. However, e-participation faces its own number of challenges, mainly that it is not perceived as being worth the time of participating. Gamification, the use of games and game elements in non game contexts, has seen application in e-participatory contexts in recent years, as a method to engage more citizens. The methods applied in this research, to study the intersection of games and e-participation, are literature study and qualitative interviews. The interviews were conducted with three professionals who have facilitated four cases where gamification was applied to citizen participation; Skaparstaden, B3-Design Your Marketplace, Blockholm, and Byggkrossen. Through the literature study I identified seven categories which I deemed relevant for professionals to consider when applying gamification to a citizen participation context; creator, core service, purpose of gamification, target audience, motivational affordances, degree of participation, and inclusivity. With these seven categories I constructed a matrix which was then used as a model to discuss the four cases of gamified e-participation. Through the discussion I discovered that several aspects from the cases align with that of the literature, such as striving to involve a younger demographic. There were also interesting aspects that deviated from the literature, such as how gamification struggles to include adults, who may view these processes as being “not serious”. The thesis concludes by stating that while gamification possesses the potential to facilitate greater engagement it is highly case dependent. The specific situation, site, and target audience should determine how the gamified process is designed. There are also challenges to these processes, the most pronounced one being the difficulty of balancing the playful game elements and the serious aspects of citizen participation. Ultimately, gamification is a good tool within citizen participation, but which benefits from being used in conjunction with in-person participatory processes, instead of as a standalone service.