Games, Power and Democracies

This volume discusses the promises and the challenges behind the use of gamification in public governance, both at the national and supranational levels. The first section reviews the landscape of gamification—taking a brief look at its history, providing definitions and examples of its application within the private and public sectors (at the national level), and introducing the readers to a number of problems linked with the use of gamification. The second part shifts the focus from the descriptive to the problematic analysis of gamification in governance. The third section ventures beyond the empirical analysis to address the impact of gamification strategies on participatory democracy in the national and supranational legal spaces.

Gianluca Sgueo is a Policy Analyst at the European Parliamentary Research Service (European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium) and Department Director of I-Com, Institute for Competitiveness (Rome, Italy). He is also a professor of Global Advocacy; Gamification in the Private/Public Sectors; and Media, Activism and Democracy at universities around Europe. Stefaan Verhulst is the co-founder and Chief Research and Development Officer at New York University GovLab.