Gamification
Resources
Level Up Our Planet: How Gamification is Fueling Eco-Action
https://rewrap.eu/level-up-our-planet-how-gamification-is-fueling-eco-action/
Our planet is facing unprecedented environmental challenges. Pollution is choking our oceans, climate change is wreaking havoc on ecosystems, and critical resources like clean water are under immense strain. While collective action is urgently needed, motivating people to make greener choices in their daily lives can be difficult. This is where gamification comes in.
Gamification involves applying game mechanics like points, badges, and leaderboards to real-world contexts. This taps into people’s natural desires for competition, achievement, and connection. Gamification is now being powerfully leveraged to drive positive environmental behaviors across the globe. Exciting apps and platforms are gamifying activities like recycling, energy conservation, sustainable transportation and more. As players level up, our planet benefits.
Boosting biodiversity monitoring using smartphone-driven, rapidly accumulating community-sourced data
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.93694.1
Ecosystem services, which derive in part from biological ø∂diversity, are a fundamental support for human society. However, human activities are causing harm to biodiversity, ultimately endangering these critical ecosystem services. Halting nature loss and mitigating these impacts necessitates comprehensive biodiversity distribution data, a requirement for implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. To efficiently collect species observations from the public, we launched the ‘Biome’ mobile application in Japan. By employing species identification algorithms and gamification elements, the app has gathered >6M observations since its launch in 2019. However, community-sourced data often exhibit spatial and taxonomic biases. Species distribution models (SDMs) enable infer species distribution while accommodating such bias. We investigated Biome data’s quality and how incorporating the data influences the performance of SDMs. Species identification accuracy exceeds 95% for birds, reptiles, mammals, and amphibians, but seed plants, molluscs, and fishes scored below 90%. The distributions of 132 terrestrial plants and animals across Japan were modeled, and their accuracy was improved by incorporating our data into traditional survey data. For endangered species, traditional survey data required >2,000 records to build accurate models (Boyce index ≥ 0.9), though only ca.300 records were required when the two data sources were blended. The unique data distributions may explain this improvement: Biome data covers urban-natural gradients uniformly, while traditional data is biased towards natural areas. Combining multiple data sources offers insights into species distributions across Japan, aiding protected area designation and ecosystem service assessment. Providing a platform to accumulate community-sourced distribution data and improving data processing protocol will contribute to not only conserving natural ecosystems but also detecting species distribution changes and testing ecological theories.
Digital Games and Biodiversity Conservation
https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12113
Digital games play an important role in the lives of millions of people worldwide. The games industry is expanding rapidly, and games are developing in sophistication and complexity. Games (and gaming approaches to other activities) are increasingly being used for serious or social purposes in a wide range of fields, including biodiversity conservation. This paper evaluates the potential of “conservation games” (digital games that promote conservation). It explores ways in which conservation might make use of digital games in the areas of (1) education and behavior change, (2) fundraising, and (3) research, monitoring, and planning. It discusses the risk that games may distract gamers from the real world and its problems or provide misleadingly simple narratives about conservation issues. We conclude that there is great potential for conservation to take more advantage of digital games, provided that conservation games are developed in collaboration with game design specialists, have specific rather than general aims, target a specific and conservation-relevant audience, and (above all) are fun to play.
Gamified Citizen Science: A Study of Expert Users in the Field of Biodiversity
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1449975/fulltext01.pdf
In previous research, researchers have looked into different gamified applications of citizen science such as fold.it, Zooniverse and Happy Moths. However, the users and participants of these studies are often on different skill levels, or beginners in the field. In this study, 10 expert users who submit their findings of species to Artdatabanken, an organisation that works in the field of biodiversity, were interviewed to find out their motivations for reporting their findings. This was done with the goal of finding what type of gamification that might suit these expert users to increase the quality of the data submitted through Artportalen, together with any obstacles that might hinder it. Through a latent thematic analysis and comparing the themes to Bartle’s Taxonomy of Players, the results show that these users were mainly of the types ‘achiever’ and ‘socialiser’. The answers were also compared to the theory of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, which showed that the users are mainly reporting because of extrinsic motivation. While this supports the implementation of gamification there were things that would rather be solved by increasing usability.
Gaming for the Environment: How Games are Modernizing Conservation
Digital Games and Biodiversity Conservation
https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12113
Digital games play an important role in the lives of millions of people worldwide. The games industry is expanding rapidly, and games are developing in sophistication and complexity. Games (and gaming approaches to other activities) are increasingly being used for serious or social purposes in a wide range of fields, including biodiversity conservation. This paper evaluates the potential of “conservation games” (digital games that promote conservation). It explores ways in which conservation might make use of digital games in the areas of (1) education and behavior change, (2) fundraising, and (3) research, monitoring, and planning. It discusses the risk that games may distract gamers from the real world and its problems or provide misleadingly simple narratives about conservation issues. We conclude that there is great potential for conservation to take more advantage of digital games, provided that conservation games are developed in collaboration with game design specialists, have specific rather than general aims, target a specific and conservation-relevant audience, and (above all) are fun to play.