From forceful compliance to motivated endorsement: effects of gamification on policy compliance during COVID-19

The commonly applied strategies for promoting policy compliance can be coercive, potentially hindering behavioural change and discouraging individuals from taking a proactive role in their social settings. These approaches also pose risks related to ethics as they may sacrifice individual agency and autonomy. However, contemporary motivational strategies may provide solutions to these conundrums. One of the prominent approaches is gamification, which aims to foster engagement and intrinsic motivation by using game-like design. Despite increasing interest, the corpus on gamification is yet to comprehensively investigate its effects on policy compliance and proactive citizen behaviours. Therefore, this study examines the relationships between gamification design types, gameful experience, policy compliance and safety citizenship behaviour in the social distancing context (during COVID-19) using a vignette-based online experiment (n = 937). Based on the results, gamification supports policy compliance and safety citizenship behaviour. The results further indicate that the effect of gamification is mediated by the engaging gameful experience it creates, and adds granularity by showing the differential effects of achievement and progression-based, competitive, and immersive designs. The findings provide evidence of gamification’s potential as a non-coercive method of helping people follow policies while encouraging a proactive citizen role.