How to gamify government

This article is written by Lobna Hassan, postdoctoral researcher at the Gamification Group, Tampere University, Finland.

In recent years, games like FarmVille, Candy Crush and Bejeweled have taken the world by storm. For example, Candy Crush alone has approximately 272 million active monthly players.

Many of us play these games while waiting in a line to pass time, at home after a stressful day at work or because family, colleagues or friends were playing them, and they sucked us in.

Games like these are interesting for several reasons. They were and are pervasively popular across different socioeconomics, demographics, age groups and cultures. Your mum might play them, as well as your five-year-old nephew or a college professor in a different country. In this way, they prove that games are very engaging for most people and not just the niche group of people colloquially known as “gamers”.

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Why we love games

There are many reasons games are engaging. Perhaps the main reason is that games can give us so-called “optimal experiences”, also referred to as gameful experiences.

“Depending on the game, we get experiences of relaxation, challenge, flow, mastery, relatedness, feedback, escapism, accomplishment and many other experiences and feelings”

Depending on the game, we get gameful experiences of relaxation, challenge, flow, mastery, relatedness, feedback, escapism, accomplishment and many other experiences and feelings.

Experiences like these, as psychology findings often indicate, speak to some of our most innate human needs, such as the needs for mastery and relatedness. As a result, we find games engaging and many of us spend many hours playing them.

Observing this engaging power of games, the gamification “movement” emerged around 2010. The question on the minds of the people behind the movement is whether we can use game design to make other activities in life as engaging as games are.

Can we employ game design to create engaging educational games that help students persist with learning longer and consequently learn more? Can we design engaging exercise apps that can help us exercise more and so be in better shape? Can we create tools that make us actively communicate with our governments and contribute to the betterment of our communities?

The gamified city

From this seed, gamification emerged as a research field and practice.

Through real-life experiments and academic research, our understanding of gamification has matured. Today, gamification is understood as a process of designing services, systems and activities to make them afford engaging, positive experiences – similar to those afforded by good games.

This has often been realised through borrowing from game design practices with the aim to positively impact engagement with activities that may not be inherently engaging.

Imagine this: a real-life city is interested in developing a new plot of land at its outskirts. The administrators have several options available to them for how this plot of land could be developed. It can become a residential area, with a few schools, maybe a university and some small shops. Or it can become an industrial area where a few workshops and small factories can be set up. It can perhaps even become a small airport to improve connections to and from the city.

The process of city planning and deciding which options to implement is complex and requires balancing a few – perhaps too many – variables and trade-offs that citizens are often unaware of. Often, no matter which option the city planners decide on, it is very likely that it will make some citizens happy and others furious, as is often the nature of trade-offs.

In the long run, the lack of citizen involvement in such governmental decision-making, and the lack of understanding of the basis at which governmental decisions are made, can reduce trust in government, its legitimacy and the potential for communal engagement.

But imagine a FarmVille-like simulation game of said city that is available for public access and downloadable on iOS and Android. The simulation mirrors the real-life city.

The latest census data has been employed in building the virtual city and so the demographics of the people inhabiting the virtual city mirror real demographics. The virtual and real city share the same growth rate, the same natural resources and budget constraints. Even the streets and buildings in the virtual city have been constructed according to a Google Street View scan. The virtual city is a digital twin of the real one.

Designing for participation

Players of this simulation would be asked the question: how do you think we should develop this plot of land?

And because the “game” is a real simulation, they can play with the options and see how each choice would positively and negatively impact their city.

“The value of such a game is that players would practically develop a better understanding of the processes city planners have to go through, improving public perception of such processes”

The value of such a game is that players would practically develop a better understanding of the processes city planners have to go through, improving public perception of such processes and perhaps support for and legitimacy of the decisions planners take.

Players might even accidentally uncover solutions that city administrators might not have been aware of, leading to better decisions.

This example is, perhaps, quite resource-intensive, but it can be scaled down depending on the resources available and the needs of the governments employing gamification.

One real-world example is the app Community PlanIt. This app starts by showing citizens a video about an issue at hand for which their contribution is needed.

Citizens are next directed on various missions around their city to gain more understanding and to interact with each other, earning points in the process, which they can choose to spend on real-life initiatives they would like to see implemented in their city.

The strength of this app is that cities, including several in the US – most prominently Philadelphia – have used it to showcase how they have actually funded initiatives, increasing trust in the administrators of said cities.

Another app under research, Geo-Zombie, asked individuals to report any problems they face in their daily lives, for example roadblocks, so that they can be addressed quickly. Through the app, these roadblocks are then reimagined as zombies that have to be identified and tackled to ensure the safety of the city.

This not only improves city management, but creates a fun experience for the players. Similar designs have been implemented to create crowdsourced maps of cities that identify accessible and inaccessible parts for wheelchair users.

What you need to think about before you gamify

The process of designing apps like these is so complex that many such applications might fail or be received poorly.

For starters, game design and games – the inspiration source of gamification – are themselves very complex to design. It requires a large array of expertise in several fields, including but not exclusive to game design, psychology, programming, design, literature and the arts. Hence, it is likely that the expertise needed is realised through teams, rather than through individual gamification designers.

The process usually starts with determining concrete objectives for gamification and how to measure its success. How many should be actively using the app for it to be considered successful? Is the criterion for success that citizens send 500 new ideas to the government every month? 10 well-crafted ideas? Or is the aim that players get educated about civic matters? Is receiving 10 pictures of roadblocks a day a success?

Gamification objectives and success criteria often differ depending on the context, but it is essential to have a clear measure of success at the outset in order to guide later design processes and evaluate the work that is being done.

Next, it is essential to conduct analyses of the expected users of the gamification and the conditions under which they would be using the gamified solution. It is important to connect gamification objectives to what we know/can know about the people who would use it.

For example: why would people bother to go around and take pictures of roadblocks or inaccessible locations? Can we find a motivation for this activity from what we know about the potential users? How about people with relatively lower tech-skills or with disabilities – can our design be inclusive of them?

Because of questions like these, gamification often requires expertise in the domain in which it is being applied, whether that is in education, marketing or political practices. Often, we need to work closely with policymakers or city officials to make sure that the gamification being developed not only adheres to their objectives, but additionally to target-user-specific and context-specific requirements, as well as any additional legal or ethical requirements that gamification designers may not otherwise be aware of.

It is especially essential with gamification in governmental context to ensure that service and activities remain accessible to the general public through means outside gamification, as not all of the audience is expected to have the technology literacy skills needed.

For example, if a gamified app is being introduced to encourage the use of public transport, it is essential that paying for public transport remains possible in cash or through other means to ensure that public transport is equally accessible to everyone.

Game over?

After the objective for gamification and the design background have been determined, designers and developers usually begin an iterative process of brainstorming, designing, prototyping, revising designs, holding focus groups to evaluate prototypes, re-prototyping etc, until a gamified solution is developed.

Dedicating adequate testing and development time, as well as resources, for this part of the gamification process increases the likelihood that the developed solution will appeal to target users. Testing solutions with target users as early as possible also ensures that edits can be made earlier in the processes when they are less consequential and expensive.

Gamified solutions should then be actively monitored once deployed. This is to determine if the solution is on track to realising its set objectives or if revisions and redesigns are needed.

As has been seen with Community PlanIt, a key to the success of gamification in governmental context has been actively giving citizens feedback on how their contributions are being read by the government and how they have made a difference on ground. Without such a feedback loop from the government, users inevitably feel that their engagement with this app, even if it is fun, is pointless and may quit using it.

In this light, gamification is a double-edged sword – not unlike mobile phones, electricity or any other technological advancement we have seen,.

It can lead to positive engagement that increases governmental legitimacy and enhances democratic practices, but it can also lead to malicious online campaigns and create more ground for differentiating between citizens in access to basic rights and services.

Gamification is, however, a pervasive trend in designing, not just on electronic interfaces, but on the streets, in schools and in homes.

This means that it is important for us to approach it with a critical mind, keen on utilising it for the public good and the betterment of communities.

Lobna Hassan

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash