How to Gamify e-government services? A Taxonomy of Game Elements

Abstract

Gamification has been employed in e-government services domain over the past twenty years. The literature shows that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design of gamified strategies in e-government platforms and services. This document displays a taxonomy of game elements for e-government services. Authors first identified and analysed the game elements commonly employed by gamification frameworks and models focused on e-government services. Next, researchers determined a taxonomy composed of gamification elements for egovernment services. The gamification elements are: Reputation, Competition, Cooperation-Team, Social interaction, Progress bar, Reward-prize, Level, Badge, Point, Ranking-Leaderboard, Mission, Puzzle, Goal, Customization, Emotion, Vote, User profile, Player roles, Stories, Avatar, Rule, Lifetime, Economy, Imposed Choice-Action, Forum, Chat, Share, Post, Emoticons and Location tagging. All these game elements were collected from the literature. Next, to evaluate the taxonomy, the authors conducted workshops, in 3 rounds, with 19 gamification experts to evaluate the taxonomy. The proposed taxonomy, with 30 game elements, was well accepted of the experts because helps to standardising the game elements employed in e-government services. Authors also believe that the taxonomy created can be used within most existing frameworks, since its definitions cover most of the elements that exist in previous frameworks in e-government services.