There is a substantial body of literature suggesting a wide range of health benefits from forest bathing, hiking and walking in nature. For this reason, it is worth looking into technologies that could direct people to these activities. In this study, we focused on location-based games (LBGs) to identify and elucidate opportunities that the games provide for forest-goers, landowners and the forest industry. We invited experts from the fields of gamification (n=5), forestry (n=8) and others (n=3) to a design workshop on this topic. Using a qualitative analysis and synthesis to organize the generated workshop material, we ended up with eight potential aspects where LBGs could benefit forest-goers, and six categories of use cases where the games could benefit landowners and the forest industry. Our findings can be understood as a general overview of the design space of LBG - forest -human interaction and serve as a basis for future work in this domain.
For decades researchers have reported, in
various empirical settings, that spending time in
nature has a multitude of positive effects, both
psychological [
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
[
When looking for motivational approaches,
gamification has received a lot of traction recently
[
This work seeks to fulfill two main research
gaps. First, we seek to move beyond LBGs’
capability to influence player movement [
RQ1: What potential benefits can locationbased games offer for forest-goers?
RQ2: What crowdsourcing opportunities do location-based game players offer for landowners and the forest industry?
The literature on the benefits of spending time
in forests has been traditionally divided into
research on forest-bathing [
One of the often-discussed benefits of
forestgoing is reduced stress [
We focus on a country that has a major forest
industry, Finland. In Finland, 86% of the entire
geographical area is forest land, which includes
productive forests as well as open mountain areas
and open bogs. 67% of the total area is being used
at least to some extent for commercial timber
production, and the rest is conserved by law,
owner’s decision or land use plan [
Due to the large number of forest owners and
the financial importance of the forest sector for
Finland [
One challenge that forest owners face is the difficulty of knowing exactly what is in the land they own. To resolve this issue, the Finnish forest authority regularly collects and produces information from forests via sensors and remote sensing methods2 (e.g., camera shots taken by drones). However, the challenge here is that sensors provide information only from a limited forest area every year, and there are limits in what kind of information can be obtained from limited sensor data. Thus, currently collected information concerns mainly timber quantity. This means limited knowledge regarding flora and fauna, timber quality, possible storm damages, quality of water reserves in the area, hikers and travelers visiting the forest and so forth.
One way to further develop data collection
from forests is gamification [
The current research lies at the intersection of gamification and forest sciences, and therefore, it is crucial to obtain viewpoints from both disciplines. To this end, we designed a workshop for academic stakeholders for answering the two RQs presented in this work and joint discussions about how to reach these goals.
We recruited informants from primarily the fields of gamification and forestry by utilizing our extended networks. In addition to the organizing authors, altogether 16 participants joined the workshop, of whom 8 worked primarily in forest sciences, 5 in gamification and 3 in other related disciplines. The participants are detailed below in Table 1. Participants joined the workshop for 3 hours on September 23rd, 2021. The workshop was held online at Zoom due to limitations in travel caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. All participants stayed at the workshop until the end and agreed to the recording of the sessions as well as to the use of their anonymized answers in research. 2 Finnish Forest Centre, 2021. Open forest and nature information. Visited on Dec 1st 2021. https://www.metsakeskus.fi/en/open
The workshop itself was organized as follows. In the beginning, the first author introduced the workshop topic by presenting the design space, design issues and a summary of past work on the topic (45min). This was followed by a group session (15min) in small teams about the design issue of how LBGs could benefit landowners and the forest industry. We went through the results together (15min) and had a small break (15min). Next, in the same small groups we discussed the potential of LBGs for forest-goers (15min) and again went through the results together afterwards (15min). We closed the workshop by collectively designing solutions to the identified issues (30min) and having general discussion on the feasibility of these solutions (30min). The second author took notes during the entire duration of the workshop and assisted in ensuring that the parallel group sessions operated smoothly. Immediately following the workshop, both organizing authors wrote down thoughts regarding the ideas presented at the workshop, and information related to them. These notes together with the workshop recording and transcription were used as data sources in the analysis. 3.2.
The goal of the data analysis was to identify
and demystify all unique ideas presented at the
forest-and-nature-information
workshop regarding the potential benefits that
LBGs offer for (1) forest-goers; and (2)
landowners and the forest industry. As is typical
with inductive qualitative research, this process
was iterative, and we adjusted our analysis to
ensure all data points were considered and
meaningfully connected [
First, we familiarized ourselves with the data
sources. We re-listened the recording of the
workshop a couple of times and read the notes
taken during and immediately after the workshop.
At this stage, we fetched unique ideas and
concepts of LBGs potential for forest-goers and
landowners, guided by our a priori formulated
research questions. Second, we conducted open
coding [
We investigated the potential of LBGs to offer forest goers meaningful, positive or otherwise beneficial experiences. As a result of the workshop and included parallel expert discussions, eight potential positive outcomes were identified and connected to specific LBG mechanics. These are displayed in Figure 1 in the Appendix. The mechanisms and potential benefits are derived directly from the data, but their interconnections and the aggregate outcomes are part of the authors’ interpretation of the data. Next, we go through these eight potential outcomes in detail.
The experts thought that it would be prudent for LBGs to teach players about how to behave in forests or natural environments. For example, in Finland, irrespective of forest ownership, there are everyman’s rights that grant people the legal right to walk in forests as well as gather berries and mushrooms from there. LBGs could inform players about such rights. Furthermore, the games could teach about how to navigate in nature by providing a terrain map or teach about flora, fungi and animals that dwell in the forest.
Besides informative content, the experts theorized that LBGs could help players get acquainted with nature through connecting game mechanics to the real-world environment the players are in. One presented idea related to building a sensor network on top of which LBGs could be created that make detailed use of the environment. For example, aspects such as humidity, rain, slipperiness, terrain, birds and ant hills could be incorporated into the game.
According to the experts, these goals could be achieved through on-spot teaching, machine learning techniques for identifying sounds in the forest and machine vision or other techniques for identifying flora and fauna that the player encounters, providing them with information about. These approaches could be gamified and integrated as part of the LBG playing in such a way that players would learn about their environment while playing.
The forests in Finland, Canada and elsewhere provide a lot of free healthy food, which serves as nutrition for e.g., bears, reindeer, multiple bird species, insects, bugs and humans. This nutrition includes, for example, lingonberries, blueberries, wild mushrooms and wild herbs. According to some estimates, over 90% of berries in Finnish forests are unpicked every year, even though roughly 3000 foreign foragers are invited to Finland annually to assist in the foraging3. Hence, despite the various life forms enjoying the nutrition as well, there is room for humans to increase the collection of this free food without harming the ecosystem.
There are several reasons why so much of the nutrition ends up wasted from the human perspective. First, finding mushrooms, blueberries etc. in their optimal season is not always a straightforward task. Second, it takes time and effort (and typically a car) to travel to distant forests. Some of the most remote areas also require hiking. A lot of people either lack the time or are willing to spare the effort. Third, not all forest-goers are able to identify which mushrooms, berries and herbs are edible, or may not know where to look.
The experts brought up machine vision methods, but also several other means through which LBGs could be designed or enhanced to help players identify nutritious food around them. For example, players could be given a set of questions about how a mushroom they found looks like, and through answering the questions the system could identify the mushroom and provide information about it. The concept of onspot teaching was judged to be superior in terms of teaching, as it combined the experience in the forest and the discovery of something new with learning about what it is.
In addition to on-spot teaching and learning, the participants discussed how players could be directed to find berries and mushrooms. Here crowdsourcing and other means to pinpoint berry and mushroom locations could be investigated. These functionalities could also include a multiplayer component, as players could see which areas have already been checked by other players, meaning they could go look elsewhere. Furthermore, players could voluntarily choose to 3 More than 1000e income. This is how it’s done with berries, https://www.is.fi/taloussanomat/oma-raha/art-2000001802063.html, visited 4th of December, 2021 reveal optimal harvesting locations to other players. The experts also discussed how LBGs could utilize special in-game events to direct players to forests in specific times and seasons when interesting things happen, so they could be around when, for example, berries are ripe for picking.
The concept of belonging was discussed at the levels of social belongingness and a sense of being united with nature. The experts discussed LBGs’ potential to influence players’ social life in two ways. First, the games provide ways to find companionship from other players. Second, the games can help players find time alone. Being united with other forest-goers can have social benefits but being alone in a forest can have meditative and restorative advantages. Some people may visit nature specifically to avoid busy and noisy urban life. The experts pinpointed that some forest-goers may specifically seek to avoid encounters with other people. Hence, both individual and multiplayer functionalities should be implemented to provide players the opportunity to enjoy nature as they want.
With regards to being united with nature, the experts associated the processes of spending time in forests, learning about the forest and having meaningful experiences in the forest with the development of a sense of belonging in nature. Furthermore, one of the introduced ideas suggested that LBGs could also connect homebound people to forests by, for example, creating games that are played from home, but which are based on real forests. Such games could be (1) purely map-based through using real world maps as the background; (2) built on top of a digital twin of a real forest; or (3) make use of 3D cameras mounted on top of a physical player where player 1 would physically go to the forest wearing a headset and player 2 would be home seeing what player 1 sees and participating in the experience.
Players may obtain gratifications for
participating in “the common good” such as
climate change activism, collecting trash from
forests, citizen science or informing other players
about locations of nutritious food in a forest.
While some of these aspects such as collecting
trash from forests can be difficult to gamify,
academic studies suggest that crowdsourcing
information can be an effective strategy for
collecting detailed and high-quality information
[
for about
Crowdsourcing was identified by the experts as the single biggest way LBG players could be useful to landowners and forest industry, but also to land use planning more widely. The ideas presented by the experts could be divided into ways to motivate crowdsourcing, what data to collect and use cases where the data could be used. These ideas arose directly from the data and the authors were responsible only for identifying and organizing them. They are summarized in Figure 2 in the Appendix.The experts brought forward five motivators for participating in crowdsourcing of forest data: (1) citizen science; (2) carbon conservation revenue programs as a source of external motivation; (3) learning and acquiring new skills; (4) having an emotional connection to nature and wanting to protect it; and (5) gamification elements.
These categories of motivation are broad, as for example, learning and acquiring new skills can encompass things such as the identification of plant species and bracket fungi, knowledge about forest wildlife and being able to navigate in forest landscapes. Regarding the emotional connection to nature, we note that while being in forests can boost this connection, it can also serve as a reason to go to forests in the first place.
From the LBG design perspective, the most
relevant motivators are (3) learning and acquiring
new skills; and (5) gamification. The rest will
either come automatically, externally or implicitly
in such a manner that it is difficult to incorporate
them into LBG artifact design. The panel of
experts produced some preliminary ideas for both
(3) and (5). With regards to learning, the experts
discussed e.g., on-spot teaching and augmented
reality for enhancing the forest experience.
Regarding gamification, the experts felt it was
important that the game mechanics would be
meaningfully connected to nature. Multiplayer
functionalities were seen as particularly
important, and they were also in focus when
looking at the enjoyment of the forest-goers. This
also aligns with previous studies on the use of
gamification to motivate crowdsourcing [
The experts highlighted the following aspects that LBG players could collect data from: (1) detection of dead wood; (2) obtaining knowledge which areas are popular among forest dwellers; (3) photos of beautiful scenery within the forest; (4) photos of storm damage, insect outbreaks or other calamities; and (5) pinpointing the location of animals, rare plant species, desired vegetation or undesired vegetation.
Regarding photos of beautiful scenery, this could also be used in research through investigating which elements contribute to the LBG players’ preferences of a beautiful location (e.g., stones, streams and other water elements, paths, rocks, cliffs, vegetation, scenic landscape, trees, wildlife…). Regarding photos of storm damage and insect outbreaks, they are useful when combined with the players’ location, as this can help pinpoint the locations, enabling a targeted investigation by professionals or other stakeholders. The pinpointing of animals and vegetation could be used to find berries and mushrooms, to remove invasive vegetation, or to understand the territories of wild animals. Altogether this information can be useful for both landowners, conservationists and foresters, where perhaps foresters are more concerned with timber quality, conservationists with animal locations and invasive vegetation and landowners with all the data points. 4.2.2. Use cases
Connected to the collected data and arising from having it at disposal, several use cases arose. The data could be used to support forestry decision making, or decision making, cities, municipalities, landowners, public organizations or other stakeholders. The decision-making processes can draw from all the data sources mentioned in the previous section, as well as other data sources. For example, photographic data of beautiful scenery could be used to design hiking trails that take people to these beautiful places, promoting hiking, tourism and enjoyment in nature. Landowners can use the data to learn about their forests.
The data on insect outbreaks and storm damages can be particularly useful for forest officials when mitigating damages or deciding what action to take in the case of a calamity. For example, if a forest fire breaks out it may be useful to know what all wildlife could be in that area, how the fire is expected to spread (by knowing the type and quality of the vegetation) and so forth. Overall, this data can be useful in supporting the planning of forest management and voluntary conservation programs.
We summarize our findings regarding the two research questions of this study as follows: Regarding RQ1 “What potential benefits can location-based games offer for forest-goers?”, we identified eight unique benefits ranging from learning how to behave in forests and establishing a connection with nature to assistance in finding companionship or time alone. The benefits could be connected to four aggregate themes, which were: (1) learning; (2) obtaining nutrition; (3) a sense of belonging; and (4) benefitting society. The participants also detailed out design ideas and mechanisms for reaching these goals, which lay the groundwork for design-oriented studies in LBGs for supporting beneficial human-forest interaction (See Figure 1).
Regarding RQ2 “What crowdsourcing opportunities do location-based game players offer for landowners and the forest industry?”, our findings were sorted into three categories: (1) motivators; (2) what data to collect; and (3) how the data can be used. The motivation part was largely a collection of gamification and design strategies for making participation more fun. This information can be used as ideas in design – oriented work. Among what data to collect we obtained a diverse set of ideas ranging from detection of decayed wood to pinpointing locations of unwanted or desired vegetation (See Figure 2). The use cases were also manifold, and according to the informants crowdsourcing forest information can be beneficial for forestry decision making, tourism, landowners to learn about their land, the creation of digital twins and simulation games.
Our findings revealed some new potential
benefits which have not yet been mentioned in the
extant literature on LBGs (see, e.g. [
With regards to the discovered opportunities
for crowdsourcing data from forests for
landowners and the forest industry, we contribute
to the research on crowdsourcing and
gamification [
In all research involving experts, the sampling
of the experts opens some limitations, since likely
there will always be some viewpoints that are
excluded. For this reason, the ideas generated by
the experts are not an exhaustive list of all
possibilities. To address this limitation, future
work could involve stakeholders with even more
diverse backgrounds. In addition, we collected
data from a single session. While the workshop
contained parallel sessions and produced rich
data, additional iterations involving the experts
could yield further ideas and help rank the ideas
based on significance and applicability. To
address this limitation, we propose that this line of
research is continued by adopting iterative
qualitative methods such as the Delphi-method
[
With regards to the presented design
suggestions and goals of LBGs for the forest
industry, we encourage future studies to look
further into the discovered goals and benefits. Our
findings offer a groundwork for design science
research that seeks to come up with prototype
designs and LBG artifacts that aim to fulfill one
or several of the design goals identified in this
study. Finally, while our focus was on the benefits
of LBGs, recent research has urged scholars to
also acknowledge and study the negative
outcomes of gamification [
This article was supported by the Academy of Finland Flagship Programme under Grants No. 337653 and 337655 (Forest-Human-Machine Interplay (UNITE)).