Gamifying Green: Sustainable Innovation Through Digital Platform Ecosystems

Platform-enabled innovation has come to dominate contemporary discourse on digital sustainability initiatives in emerging markets. Rather than offering a celebratory account of this new turn, this research explores how a digital platform initiative pioneered by Ant Forest leverages a gamified reward system to mobilize emotional incentives, platform integration, and social participation to cultivate what we term “digital green citizenry.” Incentivizing millions of users in China to engage in low-carbon behaviors—such as walking and making digital payments, we unpack how Ant Forest's dual incentive model—combining habit formation with emotional fulfillment—has enabled the integration of sustainability into users' everyday routines. Explicating a culturally grounded transferable framework for digital sustainability, we theorize how platform strategies could be aligned with environmental responsibility and ecological incentives in diverse sociotechnical environments to support digital sustainability.