Reward-based vs. Social Gamification: Exploring Effectiveness of Gamefulness in Public Participation

In the last decades, there has been a plethora of research on how to foster public participation. Recently, academia started to experiment with gamification aiming to design participation platforms more engaging as well as attract more citizens. In this paper we analyze the effects of game-inspired elements when applied in public participation applications. In particular, we focus on two types of gamification, namely reward-based gamification and social gamification. Our results suggests that while not everyone perceives gamifying participation as appropriate, social gamification has a greater potential of motivating citizens to become engaged. At the same time, we found no indications that gamification decreases the quality of participation.