Sensified Gaming: Design Patterns and Game Design Elements for Gameful Environmental Sensing

Participatory Sensing, i.e. collaboratively taking sensor measurements with mobile devices in a Citizen Science fashion, has become increasingly popular. Because such scenarios often require a critical mass of users, applying gamification to different areas in order to increase user engagement has been proposed. However, existing attempts often default to the standard points, badges, and leaderboards and fail to recognize the potential of exploiting game design elements beyond creating user engagement. We propose not to think of Gamified Participatory Sensing when designing such systems, but rather of Sensified Gaming. To this end, this work presents a collection of design patterns and game mechanics that can be used to identify or design suitable games, into which participatory sensing tasks can be embedded. We identified four core tasks from participatory environmental sensing and sensor networks research, reviewed hundreds of design patterns and map each of the 63 selected patterns to the core tasks.