Gamified eco-driving: A systematic literature review

Due to the ongoing social turmoil and the climate crisis, passenger road vehicles face increasing pressure to improve energy-efficiency. A central aspect of this endeavor is to motivate drivers to adopt a more energy-efficient driving style. In that respect, the use of information systems (IS) can be a game changer. Among motivational IS, especially gamification is a promising approach to encourage eco-driving as it has the potential to direct user behavior by providing positive experiences like those experienced when playing games. However, despite the emerging interest on gamified eco-driving, there is a lack of comprehensive understanding on how gamification has been applied in the eco-driving domain, hindering the understanding of how it should be designed in this context and what areas need further research inquiries. Therefore, this study synthesizes existing research on gamified eco-driving (17 studies) through a systematic literature review. Based on the results, performance-based and social gamification are most applied, while they aim at encouraging a relatively comprehensive set of different ecodriving behaviors by addressing the motivational hurdles related to eco-driving. We encourage future research endeavors to consider a wider variety of gamification types and be more transparent about the goals of implementing gamification and evaluate the psychological effects accordingly.