Building Bridges Through Design: Game Design Strategies to Empower Young Adults Taking Social Offers - Results From a Pilot Study

In this work, we analyze whether the empowerment of young adults can be supported through gamified design approaches in a socio-spatial context. Based on a literature research, relevant empowerment factors were identified. Further, we give an overview of different gamified approaches to strengthen empowerment. We tested the results of our literature research within the implementation of a web-based application in the context of a project, which deals with digital participation processes for the youth. We suggest that gamified approaches within a web-app can be used to strengthen the empowerment of young adults in a socio-spatial context. In this paper, we focus on our process of gamifying the utilization of social offers (e.g., leisure activities, participation offers, youth welfare services) to strengthen the empowerment of young adults and thereby establish foundations for future studies examining the effect of game elements on the empowerment of young adults.