Gamifying Sustainable Consumption: Opportunities and dilemmas

In the past decades, the term “sustainable consumption” has broadly defined activities ranging from more efficient production processes to considering the consequences that individual choices convey for the wellbeing of other beings and the planet. Regardless of how it is defined, sustainable consumption (SC) is intrinsically connected to our lifestyles and the choices made to enable these. The field of sustainable consumption studies is peppered with a myriad of examples exploring different approaches to satisfy people’s needs without hampering the possibilities of others to lead prosperous lives within the limits of one planet. These approaches look into the relationships within communities and between social structures, highlighting the relevance of individual agency and the need for shared responsibility among all societal stakeholders. Given the production-consumption dynamics of our current economic system, which constantly pushes for overconsumption of goods and services, finding ways to awaken individual agency and facilitate transitions to more sustainable ways of living are daunting tasks, yet they are also an opportunity for exploring current approaches to tackle the challenge, and an invitation to innovate and push the agenda of sustainable development forward.

The present dissertation concerns itself with exploring gamification as an enabler of sustainable consumption practices. Drawing knowledge from media studies, human-computer interaction, social psychology, sociological consumer research, games research, and sustainable consumption and production studies, the seven studies comprising this research explore how sustainable consumption and gamification relate to each other from theoretical and practical standpoints. Applying mixed research methods allowed the identification of SC's most prevalent narratives and the most used channels to communicate these and enabled action through gamification. In order to provide a solid theoretical baseline and hands-on solutions for practitioners, this dissertation started by investigating communication and social learning practices to motivate sustainable consumption in everyday life (Study 1). Gamification is featured as an emergent field of practice with the potential to enable actions beyond raising awareness and educating consumers. Following this lead, Study 2, a systematic literature review, provides an in-depth exploration of how sustainable consumption and gamification research relate to each other, revealing a tendency to understand SC as actions toward CO2 reduction and waste management, also showing a high reliance on technological solutions, mainly mobile applications. The groundwork provided by this study led to three parallel lines of inquiry.

For the theoretical aspects, Study 3 follows the thread of gamified mobile applications, systematically analyzing several apps purposefully created to facilitate SC. This study reveals how most apps use very basic gamification features without implementing other game elements or any other narrative of sustainable consumption beyond resource efficiency. This study opened the door to question the reasons behind this phenomenon and what opportunities exist to support practitioners in improving existing apps or creating new ones that can survive long enough to create the impact they expect to generate.

On the practical front, Study 4 focuses on the learning from practically implementing gamification in sustainable consumption planning processes. This study conducts the argument from the broad SC communication approaches to a reflection about how these were and could be presented through gamification and analyses several case studies to facilitate gameful, collaborative practices to engage societal stakeholders in actions of shared responsibility via backcasting.

Narrative-wise, Study 5 delves into the issue of resource efficiency, the most prevalent narrative of SC. To this end, this study assesses the peer-reviewed literature on the subject of gamification as a catalyst to the circular economy from its transformative potential through the lens of transition management cycles. While gamification is mainly presented as a point-badge educational strategy to facilitate recycling reiterates, one of the analyzed studies noted its potential for communication and opened the dialogue for bringing a more socially oriented approach to CE activities.

Lastly, to understand how gamification can represent a shift in current consumption narratives and practices, Studies 6 and 7 aim to increase the understanding of sustainable gamification design from a value-oriented perspective by exploring the world of sustainable consumption apps from their creators' perspectives. Sustainable consumption apps (SCA) distinguish themselves from other apps in terms of their ultimate objective: enabling actions today to generate impact towards tomorrow’s wellbeing. As Study 3 revealed, most of these apps have very short lifespans, and the presence of two apps (for individual users and for businesses) hinted at diverse alternatives to overcome the challenges inherent to running an app as a business. Therefore, a series of interviews with SCA creators unveiled some of the conflict areas and tensions related to applying gamification that emerge from making apps and trying to keep them relevant in an increasingly competitive environment (Study 6) and also helped to provide a series of recommendations for sustainable consumption advocates willing to take up the gamified app-creation path (Study 7).

The findings of this research offer knowledge regarding how gamification could contribute to sustainable consumption communication to enable practice shifts, both from theoretical and practical perspectives. As the result of portraying a more in-depth understanding of the relationship and potential of gamifying SC approaches, this dissertation opens the door to several lines of inquiry that range from the ethical considerations of gamification and how it can tackle the behavioral countereffects of existing solutions (e.g. rebounds) to the potential to embody practices of responsible research and innovation and advance the agenda of sustainable human-computer interaction, inviting gamification and SC researchers and practitioners to support each other in their endeavors to achieve sustainable development.