A Literature Review of E-government Services with Gamification Elements

This document contains a literature review of the gamification topic, providing a conceptual background, and presenting a selection and analysis of the applications to e-government services. It identifies the common procedure of gamification application to e-government services, highlighting visible methodological gaps. The study characterises gamification element usage and highlights the need for a standardised methodology during element selection.

During this research, 2124 articles where obtained and a total number of 75 works were analysed. A total amount of 8 examples were reviewed in depth and used to reply to the questions raised and identify the current research gaps.

The following two concepts are analyzed within this paper:

1. what types of services are established according to the degree of e-government model, and
2. what are the gamification elements, the source of motivation, and the available tools.

This work aims to identify how gamification has been implemented in different public/e-government services. What is the coherence degree of the service in relation to the citizen (maturity level)? What kind of framework or gamification elements have been used? What tools were employed to assess their impact?

After checking the available literature that is closely related to the questions, the authors identify a set of research gaps that constitute opportunities for future investigators in terms of methodological development and application to assess the implementation of gamification in public services.

They identify three research gaps and  propose the following lines of work:

1. The relation between the citizen/user profile and the gamification element deployed
2. Citizen/user response to each gamification element
3. Relationship between the maturity level of the model and the gamification elements used in e-government

As lines for future work deriving from this systematic review, the authors plan to quantitatively evaluate the frequency of application of each gamification element in relation to a set of indicators. These indicators may include user profile analysis, type of model/framework, evaluation method (participation indicators or other performance indicators), etc.

You can find the paper  here.