Although mobility is an integral part of everyday life and facilitates the functioning of our societies, it also causes problems in relation to safety. Transport accidents pose a prominent global issue, and mobility enables phenomena such as pandemics that holistically affect the safe functioning of societies.
Human behaviour plays a key role in mobility safety, while the commonly applied approaches for promoting safer behaviours are predominantly based on extrinsic enforcement and incentivising. These approaches, however, can be perceived as coercive and lead to insufficient behavioural change, calling for parallel approaches to positively motivate safety.
In his doctoral dissertation, MSc Eetu Wallius shows how gamification provides an approach to encourage safer mobility behaviours through positive motivation, but also how the playful and carefree sentiment stemming from gamification can contradict safety.
Gamification motivates safer behaviours by providing a gameful experience
The initial findings of the dissertation show that, despite promising results, prior research has mainly treated safety as an individual effort. This focus was reflected in both the implemented gamification designs that largely lacked social elements, as well as the examined safety outcomes that focused on individual level safety rather than seeing people as proactive agents that can jointly enhance the safety of their social environments.
“To better understand how gamification can improve safety, there was a clear need for a more nuanced understanding of how different gamification designs motivate both rule compliance and proactive safety behaviours that go beyond the minimum requirements set by rules,” Wallius says.
Based on the gaps in current research, Wallius and colleagues developed four distinct and non-overlapping gamification designs for the pandemic mobility social distancing and evaluated their effects through an online vignette-experiment.
“The results show that the experience from using gamification encourages both compliance to rules and proactive behaviours that focus on improving the safety of one’s social settings,“ Wallius elaborates.
Not a silver bullet for safety enhancement
In his dissertation, Wallius also examines gamifications pitfalls and risks it can have on safety. The dissertation elaborates on how the playful sentiment stemming from gamifying everyday mobility can downplay perceptions of risk, and even encourage dangerous behaviours.
“It should not be treated as a silver bullet that works under all circumstances. Gamification design should be explicitly and carefully directed towards safety, while it is important to ensure that gamification design matches the context and the specific behaviours being gamified,” Wallius reveals.
An addition to the repertoire of safety enhancement strategies worth additional investigations
Eetu Wallius’ dissertation results encourage considering gamification as an alternative, or complementary strategy for encouraging safer behaviours. However, more evidence from real-world applications and long-term effects is needed.
“Now we have the initial evidence from simulations and laboratory settings that have informed us of gamifications potential, alongside many of the pitfalls and risks associated with it. It is time to apply these lessons to practice and implement gamification in real-world, long-term settings to see if gamification can truly deliver its promise and lead to sustained behavioural changes in safety,” Wallius says.
Public defence of Thursday 5 December
The doctoral dissertation of Master of Science (Engineering) Eetu Wallius in the field of games and gamification titled Gamification in Mobility Safety: Benefits, motivations, and practices will be publicly examined in the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University in Auditorium D11 in the Päätalo building (address: Kalevantie 4, Tampere) at 12:00 on Thursday 5 December 2024. The Opponent will be Professor Igor Mayer from Breda University of Applied Sciences. The Custos will be Professor Juho Hamari from the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University.
The dissertation is available online.
The public defence can be followed via remote commection (link coming soon).