Purpose – This study aims to increase our understanding of the value and ethical conflicts faced by sustainable consumption app (SCA) creators when applying gamification to support individual sustainability practices. The results include practical strategies and recommendations toward responsible innovation and sustainable human–computer interaction. Design/methodology/approach – This study consists of semi-structured interviews with 21 SCA creators, an online survey on moral foundations and thematic mapping. Findings – The apps’ content, expected impact, managerial issues and external aspects influencing their survival emerged as the four areas across which resources, the creators’ intentions, growth and trust-building strategies and gamification as a value destroyer and source of ethical tensions represent the main conflict areas. These tensions comprise engagement vs individual agency loss; third-party involvement and partnerships; rewards vs oversimplification; mandatory use vs personal drive; current knowledge vs further education; learning from others; stakeholders’ risks; experience vs unwanted outcomes and the meaning of value and collaborative design. The strategies to address these represent responsible innovation practices and are this study’s main contribution. Research limitations/implications – Including insights from non-European SCA creators and users could help identify additional opportunities for SCAs to meet their objectives. Originality/value – While studies on SCAs from the user perspective are abundant, this study takes the creators’ perspective to understand the dilemmas behind such tools. Focusing on ethical concerns and the value of gamification as a strategy to achieve the apps’ objectives offers a unique perspective for improving some of the most popular tools that enable sustainable consumption.

Mobile apps are ubiquitous, affecting our everyday practices because “there is always an app for that”. In this vein, there have been a significant number of apps devised to support people’s lifestyles to make them more sustainable. This study aims to draw an overview of gamified mobile apps for sustainable consumption. Following a systematic process, this study analyzes 67 gamified apps’ sustainability approaches and gamification concepts. It was found that (1) sustainable consumption is generally presented as the efficient use of resources to impact the environment positively, rarely addressing societal impacts or economic gains from shifting consumption practices. Other findings include (2) a lack of diversity in gamification characteristics, given the prevalence of direct communication with the user, the absence of virtual identities, and most apps targeting behavior change without attitude change. A potentially problematic design choice is (3) the presence, in some cases, of external rewards that are often contradictory to the message of sustainable consumption as they lead to more consumption. Nonetheless, based on most apps embedding sustainable consumption activities in the gamification concept and having a large number of users, it is possible to conclude that gamification has the potential to motivate shifts in their users’ lifestyles.

Considering how wicked problems, such as overconsumption, climate change, or the management of the COVID-19 pandemic rely on multiple stakeholder groups’ deliberation, this study investigates gamification's potential in participatory backcasting processes to support the emergence and growth of social innovations towards sustainability. Gameful methodologies have progressively been introduced into strategic planning processes, futures research, and transition studies, offering a powerful input to participatory backcasting processes. As gamification is a novel and impactful way to motivate and engage participants to take action during and after the participatory process, this study develops a framework for practitioners to gamify backcasting processes. Developed through state-of-the-art review of extant corpus as well as two cases of gamified participatory backcasting, the framework elucidates how participatory backcasting processes that include gamification elements designed to address engagement do have an impact on the participants, particularly in terms of the process being a positive, co-creative experience, and offer a good foundation for posterior actions.