From current research projects at the University of Applied Sciences we learned that changing mobility behaviour is very difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, to reduce negative mobility impact and support people in their daily commute, we investigated the effects of gamification in the context of commuting. Through conducting a structured literature review this paper aims to identify elements used in gamification to change users' mobility behaviour towards selecting more sustainable choices. The main challenge when doing this structured literature review was to define accurate search strings to cover our research question followed by selecting relevant papers and setting up a clear matrix for presenting the identified results. The research question answered in this paper is: What gamification elements and transport modes are employed in studies on gamification for commuter behaviour? Our paper follows the approach of Liberati et. al. [1] for systematic literature reviews. We retrieved 260 studies, 23 of them were identified for the thematic analysis. Private motorized individual transport, public transport, active mobility, and mobility sharing are the four major types of transportation modes which were identified after screening the 23 studies. Points & leaderboards, badges and quests/challenges are the main gamification elements which are identified after screening the 23 relevant papers. The positive effects of the individual elements are shown in the discussion and conclusion section.
systematic literature review
Gamification, behavioral change, smart and playful cities, mobility service, commuter,
Transport emission account for one-fifth of the
global CO2 emissions and thereof 41%
the
passenger car is accountable for [
2); philipp.graf@fh-steyr.at (A.
3); (A.
4);
lisa-maria.putz
2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
problems. The term commute refers to a journey
that is non-discretionary and undertaken frequent
between home and work [
infrastructure
improvements, downtown driving fees, and public
transportation have been explored to significantly
improve the devastating congestion and emissions
problems in urban and catchment areas. These
approaches all have in common that they are
costly, reduce comfort for motorists, and require
changes in commuters' work routines [
One measure to reduce traffic congestion and
emissions in urban areas is ridesharing. The term
ride sharing is used for several concepts of shared
use of mobility in the literature. Ridesharing
means the sharing of a motor vehicle to share
costs (non-profit) or to compensate the driver (i.e.,
paid service), with participant billing (for-profit)
by the driver and one or more passengers [
Moreover, mobile apps for ride sharing used
gamification to incentivize more environmentally
friendly travel modes such as public transport
[
Transport policy is one of the most appropriate public areas suitable for gamification. It is characterized as a derived demand because transport is necessary to fullfill demands at the destination e.g., work, study, or leisure activity.
For the effective application of gamification in the
mobility field transport must be incorpoated as a
derived demand [
Policymakers therefore have a choice in implementing gamification in the transportation context in practice. In a derived demand intervention for transportation, gamification can either target activities required by the travel behavior ( i.e., completing the trip) or attempt to characterize transportation in that it is bundled including the goods or services that are consumed only at the end of the trip.
If the aim is to relieve congestion in the transport network by political means, for example, two different concepts can be applied.
First, as a substitute for the own car, a
gamification system for public transport could be
developed. Here, a concentration of the game
elements on variables related to the travel
behavior, e.g. travel costs or travel modes, would
be necessary. As a second option, gamification
could target the bundling of travel and
consumption of goods or services at the end of the
trip. Accordingly, the game structure would have
to be geared towards the use of public transport as
access to, for example, soccer matches, enabling,
for example, participation in a lottery for a ticket
to the next soccer match. In both cases,
gamification provides an incentive for car owners
to see public transportation as an experience and
thus increase their use of it. In practice, this has
already been used successfully to achieve change
[
We conducted a systematic literature review to identify what gamification elements and transport modes are used to aid behavioral change towards sustainable commuting. The authors drew from the four-phase model of the PRISMA statement by Liberati et al. The model proposes structuring information flow within an identification, screening, eligibility, and inclusion phase, to improve the reporting of the systematic review [1]. This approach was used as it is a wellestablished approach for systematic reviews. For the literature review, the database Scopus and the search engine Primo of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria were used. Primo covers the following databases: ACM, Belz Juventa, EBSCO Business Source Elite, Emerald Collections, Hanser E-books, IEEE/IEL, Nomos eLibrary, OECD, Sage Humanities and Social Science Package, ScienceDirect College Edition, SpringerLink Portal, Taylor and Francis, UTBStudi-E-Book, publishing house Austria ELibrary, and Wiley-Online Library. The titles of the search were downloaded on the 24th of January and the review was conducted between January and February 2023. Table 1 shows the metadata and the search strings used in Primo and Scopus. Scopus covers peer-reviewed studies and in Primo peer reviewed studies were included in the search results. as a service and other services related to mobility. The search term mobility and commut* was used to include studies in relation to commuting, commute and commuters and to narrow the results that mobility retrieves stand-alone. The keywords chang* or behave* are included to include the topic of behavioral change and generally changes induced by gamification.
Having the search string defined we retrieved 260 studies. Table 2 shows the results of the literature search in each database. After the duplicates were removed 223 studies remained. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were defined to find relevant studies for our future research. The inclusion and exclusion criteria are shown in Table 3. The search string includes the keyword gamif* in the title search to include the keywords gamification and gamify. The remaining keywords used are searched for in all the text passages of the publications. The combination of the keywords mobility and service was used to include publications related to the topic mobility After revising the title and abstract and applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria on the 223 studies, 29 studies remained. These 29 studies were full text analyzed. 6 studies were excluded because they were missing contextual connections to the research topic. 23 studies were identified as relevant for further thematic analysis. The review procedure is shown in Figure 1.
In the thematic analysis, we investigate the distribution of the 23 relevant studies on the four modes defined in the results section: motorized individual transport, public transport, active mobility, and mobility sharing. The gamification elements that were evaluated within the relevant studies are categorized as well as the benefit, incentive or reward that was offered to users is characterized. The transport modes, gamification elements and benefits, incentives and rewards are presented in the results section.
In this section the results of the 23 studies related to gamification in the mobility sector are discussed to answer the research question. The title, authors, research or deployment project, publication year and reference numbers given are shown in Table 4. Research project refers to projects based on literature and comparison thereof whereas deployment projects are projects realized and tested in real-life conditions.
The following paragraphs explain the categories used in Table 5, which compares the literature findings. Private motorized individual transport, public transport, active mobility, and mobility sharing are the four major types of transportation modes which were identified after screening the 23 studies.
Motorized (private) individual transport contains all individual transportation systems which are run by an internal engine e.g., car (including e-car) or motorcycle. E-bikes and Escooters are excluded and are part of the active mobility transportation type.
All sorts of transportation with which people travel together on designated routes (e.g. buses, trams, tubes) were clustered under the term public transport.
Active mobility refers to all kind of mobility which requires an active physical input activity. Though some e-bikes can drive without active pedal they are still clustered under active mobility due to the strong similarity with normal bikes.
Mobility sharing covers all transportation services and devices (e.g. cars or bikes) which are shared among each other. It includes car sharing schemes as well as ride sharing.
Points & Leaderboards, Badges and quests/challenges are the main gamification elements which are identified after screening the 23 papers. These elements refer to a gameplay mechanism through which users should be motivated to engage more with the system.
Points indicate how successful a task, or a
prior defined quest has been completed. Users can
compare their score with the other users score on
leaderboards, which leads to competition
amongst users [
Badges that are provided are mostly known in
advance to encourage the user to complete
personal goals without direct competition [
Quests/challenges: With a given challenge
users desired behavior can be accomplished plus
interest and participation is maintained over time.
[
Benefit/rewards/incentives: To achieve
changes in certain behavior, rewards through
incentive measures must be individual
performance related. Rewarding well performing
participants can increase the motivation to change
direction in a desired way. [
After screening the elected literature benefits in the context with gamification can be classified into direct tangible or indirect tangible benefits. Direct tangible benefits are financial rewards, discounts on products or points which can be redeemed further for rewards.
Indirect tangible benefits lead to money and
time savings through inclusion of information and
feedback from the application [
Having defined the categories used in this paper, Table 5 shows the results of our research about gamification in the field of the different transport modes and which different gamification elements have been mentioned in the publications.
Active mobility was the most examined transportation mode with a total of 15 paper covering the topic. 11 articles had references to public transportation. With 10 references mobility sharing and 9 references motorized individual transport are the least mentioned transportation modes.
The three main gamification elements points & leaderboards, badges and quests were identified in the literature. From 23 screened papers 9 covered a topic including badges and 12 referred to a point-based gamification system, some having both. Only 3 covered a quest-based gamification element. Direct tangible benefits have been addressed by 15 publications, indirect tangible benefits by 17. 4
Discussion and conclusion
The goal of this literature review was to
identify what gamification elements and transport
modes are employed in studies on commuter
behavior. We investigated how gamification
influences mobility behavior and choices made by
the users. Overall, it can be concluded that using
gamification elements had a positive effect e.g.
increased bike sharing users [
Through our review process we discovered
that within the peer-reviewed articles only few
studies present measurable results on the impact
of gamification on commuter mobility behavior
e.g. decreased CO2 emissions or quantifying the
impact of direct tangible rewards on application
usage. For instance, Kracheel et al. identified and
quantified which gamification elements users
respond by testing through mock-up games [
Another limitation of this review is that nonpeer-reviewed literature was excluded in the search. Projects, experiments, and applications that were not scientifically published are therefore not covered. Further research could include project data bases e.g. of EU-Projects and thus contribute to real-life experiences and as well as found data.
Rewards for sustainable mobility behavior
makes travel more interesting [
For further research the search string should also include GAME* as in this review the search was limited to GAMIF* and thus important publications might have been missed. In this review it was not included due to capacity reasons as the retrieved studies are significantly higher including game in the search string. The review shows that benefits/rewards/ incentives, no matter if direct tangible, indirect tangible, or their combination are vital elements when gamifying commutes or other travels.
The role of goal frames regarding the impact of gamified persuasive systems on sustainable mobility behavior.
opportunities in a changing transportation landscape
Solving “smart city” transport problems by designing carpooling gamification schemes with multi-agent systems: The case of the so-called “mordor of Warsaw”
ISC2 ECIS 2016
S12 S13 S14 S15 S16 S17 S18 S19 S20 S21 S22 S23
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Transport Policies and Infrastructure in the European Europolity
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decisions: exploring the potential for integrating augmented reality, gamification, and social components Transportation in mobile apps to influence travel decisions.
D R R R R R D D R R R D
[1] W Liberati, A., D.G. Altman, J. Tetzlaff, C.
Mulrow, P.C. Gøtzsche, J.P.A. Ioannidis, M. Clarke, P.J. Devereaux, J. Kleijnen, and D. Moher, "The PRISMA statement for reporting systematic reviews and metaanalyses of studies that evaluate health care interventions: explanation and elaboration", Annals of internal medicine, 151(4), 2009, W65-94. x x x x x x x x x 9 e g d a B x x x x 4 s e g n e l l a h c / t s e u Q e l b i gan ift t e t n c e re b i d n I e l b i gn ift a e t n tce eb r i D x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x 15 x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x 17