A gamification framework for the long-term engagement of smart citizens

Facilitating and fostering positive changes in citizens' behaviors is an important dimension in a Smart City, and one of the key issues for city sustainability. However, innovative and often costly city policies and advanced IT solutions are liable to fail, if not combined with initiatives aimed at increasing the awareness of citizens, and promoting their behavioural change. This paper explores the potential of gamification mechanisms to incentivize voluntary behavioural changes. We present a service-based gamification framework which can be used to develop long-running games on top of existing services and systems within a Smart City, and discuss some preliminary findings in an open-field experiment running in the city of Rovereto, Italy, to promote sustainable urban mobility.