Incentivizing Correct Waste Sorting by Game Design

This extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2018, describes the design and early evaluation of a free mobile serious game intended to teach and motivate correct household waste sorting. Its central premise is that citizen sorting errors stem from low awareness, weak competence, and limited commitment, and that game design can address all three. The authors argue that because municipal waste systems differ across the European Union, a localizable app that adapts to any local sorting scheme can fill a gap left by the lack of a uniform EU-wide recycling system.

The design rests on a pre-study of expert interviews with a local waste management institution and members of the public, along with a pre-test in which participants sorted 50 controversial waste items. In that pre-test, 72% of items (n=15 participants) were sorted incorrectly, and most interviewees reported little knowledge of their local system or concern about sorting correctly. The core gameplay is a conveyor-belt sorting task with immediate positive and negative feedback, supplemented by a searchable item index, character-based depictions of real recycling processes such as biogas production, and a fictional planet storyline with minigames covering glass and battery recycling intended to sustain long-term engagement.

The evaluation is preliminary and descriptive. Since its November 2014 launch and May 2015 full release, the game has recorded 7,029 downloads across Android, iOS, and Windows, with an anonymized dataset of 5,208 players. Of this subset, 44.40% continued playing after onboarding, and the average interaction span was 54.22 days. The authors present these figures as encouraging grounds for further study. Ongoing work involves quantitative analysis linking in-game behavior to design elements, qualitative analysis relating behavior to personality factors, and planned experimental and long-term studies to test whether the intended learning effect actually occurs.