Gameful virtual farm ViA Verde

CASE STUDY

Gamifying Sustainable Agriculture The Case of ViA Verde

A gameful virtual farm

Ngoc-Anatolli – Kevin – Peppi – Sini – Yuhai

Gameful experience has been working as a tool for promoting well-being and sustainable activities and merging the distinction between digital and non-digital life. By altering customer behaviours, sustainable agriculture and its commerce can be enhanced by gamer psychology. The story and mechanics of any gamified approach have always been focused on sustaining the return user metric, which also aligns with the motto of the case client: acquiring customers to know the owners’ passion and the story behind the farm. This work explores how gamified products can impact a sustainable agriculture business, thereby building a connection and leading to emotional attachment to the production process and the outcomes. Due to the relatively methodological limitations and the project’s scope, the current progress is one of many possible ways to gamify sustainable and organic agriculture.

Introduction

Developing a business model for environmentally sustainable agriculture is a challenging endeavour. Besides producing high-quality goods, the growers ought to operate according to the seasonality and land type while accessing local communities as customers. While this situation brings several challenges, mainly in economic terms, businesses developed through sustainable agriculture also possess qualities that may entail a competitive advantage, such as the production of premium products, closer customer relationships, and unique production setups attractive to diverse target groups. Identifying, exploring, and benefitting from these opportunities require public relations or marketing management skills. Frequently, it is not easy for the farmers to add these tasks to their already busy schedules, and opportunities to acquire new customers may not be seized.
The current case study describes a gamification project to support ViA Verde with the opportunities mentioned earlier. ViA Verde, a family-owned, organic farm in Penna in Teverina, Umbria, Italy, with their efforts to acquire and retain more customers. In detail, ViA is an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of Visionaries in Action.

Background

Created as a “Rural Living Lab for Sustainable Living, Learning and Regenerative Agriculture,” ViA Verde is owned by a young couple who acquired the farm that primarily produces olive oil as an effort to increase the impact of the sustainability programs offered by the organisation Forum Visionaries in Action (Forum ViA). The ViA Verde aimed to develop novel distribution channels to meet this objective. Not only does the farm commercialises their oil at a fair price (both for producers and consumers), but it also increases consumers’ engagement with sustainable agriculture by sensitising consumers about the care, labour, and extraordinary love that goes into their natural olive oil production and increase their sales in other parts of Europe.

Olive oil from ViA Verde is a premium product. According to the farm owner, most Italians already have their trusted olive oil producer. Therefore, their target market for sales is outside Italy. An underlying problem for our project was how to reach the customer segment and create a trusty relationship between producer and buyer. ViA Verde has several critical advantages compared to other olive oil producers. The owners’ theoretical solid and research background underlie much of the farm’s complete ecosystem. Most works in the agricultural cycle have been maintained sustainably and manually, which requires time and labour. For example, to revive the soil and produce green fertilisers, all compacted soil must be collected by hand, which may become a risk factor in the plan due to the shortage of labour or volunteers.
In light of the great potential of gamification, an approach that leverages motivational game affordances to create unique gameful experiences towards fruitful outcomes (CITE), we considered it a promising solution to address the needs of ViA Verde. We interviewed the owners to better understand the problems before proposing our approach. Eventually, the goals of our gamified system were defined as a solution that 1) works as a marketing tool for the farm to differentiate itself from other olive oil producers and 2) builds a connection with the customer and appeals to their emotions. The latter goal is fundamental as the farmers want their customers to be engaged with the farm first and foremost, understanding its values and the story behind it.

Method

The group brainstormed ideas for the first feedback session to kickstart the ideation process. Three ideas that came up were 1) an AR (augmented reality) olive tree, 2) a historical olive oil process, and 3) creating a storyline for the olive oil process for the customer’s website. The latter idea was further developed with the Lean Gamification Canvas [1]. The thirteen canvas sections were filled out before the interview. They were refined and corrected afterwards using information from the ViA Verde owner, allowing us to adjust our plan according to the limited budget and the farm’s main priorities. Based on the interview and observations, the team developed a ViA Verde user persona (Figure 1) and a journey map to understand the customers better and track their entire ViA Verde experience.

Since olive oil is of premium quality, the target customers are people over 30, who often have a steady income (middle to high) and can afford premium quality food products. A model of a gamification-based persona [2] was applied in combination with the Bartle test online [3], which consists of four-player types (Figure 2). Consequently, our user persona named Olivia represents the needs of our target group, and the dominant type for Olivia is the Explorer. Explorers delight in having the game expose its secrets to them. They look for compelling features and figure out how things work. They think that real fun comes from discovery. [3]

Liu and Idris note that the player types pay attention to different psychological needs [2]. The explorers want to understand [4] and cherish the concept of Play, and the element of autonomy is essential to them [2]. Therefore, providing autonomy to players was set as one of the features of the gamified application. The concept has space for learning about sustainable farming and exploring the farm freely on the map. Although we prioritised the explorer persona, we also considered other player types. The secondary type, the socialiser, needs relatedness. The need is noted by building a relationship with the farm by connecting through the actual trees and stories. The need to achieve competence comes from protecting the tree and receiving the oil.
The persona facilitated setting a direction for our design and figuring out what kind of gamification elements the target users would enjoy. However, for the further deployment of the project, user tests that would draw on different stakeholders will be needed. According to the method for engineering gamified software [5], the last stage of the process is for evaluation and monitoring. The proposed features in the project must support the current system of the farm and answer the target user group’s needs and context of use. The scope of this poster does not include user testing or usability test because this is a work-in-progress project. A SWOT analysis would benefit the project’s further development, thereby helping to predict the potential success of the idea in the actual context of use [6].

Result: The concept of a gameful virtual farm

The project focuses on increasing the number of volunteers, farm visitors, website visitors, and followers on social networks. There could be more new partners in oil sales. The created gamified concept, Gameful Virtual Farm, is an interactive map accessed through the farm’s website. It enables users to learn about the farm and explore the area from the comfort of their own homes. Furthermore, it allows users to familiarise themselves with the values and stories of the farm. The user has an option for “adopting” a tree, with 5 euros per month subscription, which is relative to the current affordable retail price of 13 euros per litre per bottle locally and 2 euros more for export, e.g., to Germany. Instead of focusing on sales and securing profit by taking 60 euros at once, the gameful application sustains intrinsic motivation and long-term engagement. The monthly recurring payment reminds the user to visit the virtual farm and take any necessary action. In return, they become a guardian of a physical tree on the farm in Italy, which they can name according to liking. In addition to the guardianship of the tree, the user will receive annual rewards for supporting the farm, such as organic olive oil. After the user has subscribed, they have a chance to interact with an olive tree in the virtual world, which will solidify their relationship with the farm more thoroughly. The virtual tree requires nurturing from the guardian, such as weeding, watering, and harvesting.
Game rules were introduced to create frames for the concept. Violation of the rules can lead to the loss of the guardian title and, consequently, the loss of oil. The pixel tree encounters specific problems (weeds, dry soil, bad weather) every few weeks, from which the guardian needs to protect the tree. The tree’s guardians must enter the site by playing a point-and-click game and nurture their tree. During the harvest season, guardians can drag the in-game olives into a press to create pixelated oil bottles. These bottles will indicate that the user has won actual oil bottles.

Reading the application through frameworks

The model of the concept is a hybrid of a donation system from people who want to be involved in sustainable farming and an annual subscription that allows the farm to send oil once a year at a specific time and not work with regular orders. If the donation is high enough to cover the cost of caring for that tree for a year, the donor gets part of the oil 4 made from the olives of that tree. This interactive element already calls for a core drive from Octalysis [7] called ownership. A photo of the natural tree and essential information is visible in-game to strengthen the connection between the tree in the game and the tree in real life. If the news from the farm is accompanied by information about a tree that will eventually bring an authentic product, users can be more willing to subscribe. Since the farm protects nature, the symbolic values (the user becomes a “guardian”) and functional values (the person will get natural olive oil at the end) from the model of Rintamäki et al. were combined [8].

Further implementation plan by ViA Verde

The ideas for the gamification design are divided according to the evaluation of the execution’s complexity: Basic functionality entails an interactive map of the farm on the website where the visitors are presented with set-up objects (i.e., trees) from the actual farm. When the user clicks an object, they will receive information about it, familiarising themselves with the environment. The map would be in pixel format to make the representation of features simpler, appealing to a sense of nostalgia from the target group (Figure 3). Shifting from the walking skeleton to the minimum viable product, the design should keep as simple and feasible as possible by utilising, for example, an affordable online tool that can design interactive maps and intuitive data. As a result, the compatibility of our approach and the farm’s capability is Prezi Design, where the team can create clickable and hoverable objects for the map, and those with no design background can continue the maintenance.

Feedback and further work

After the concept was created, ViA Verde’s owner provided feedback, which included extending the target group as the format may also appeal to younger people if the game is interactive enough. Since children have more free time and taking care of the trees can be child’s play, families could adopt a few trees, the children spend time caring for them, learning about sustainable farming, and, in the end, the whole family gets enough oil to use for a year until the next harvest. Additionally, preliminary and informal feedback was received from potential users, noting that the pixel format can be suitable for different ages and that a photo of the natural tree is intriguing. However, as there has not been user testing yet, it would be essential to test the style with target users before creating it.

Conclusions

In this poster, we have described a concept and a preliminary prototype of a gamified system aimed at increasing engagement with sustainable and organic agriculture. We have conducted a case study with ViA Verde Farm in Italy and developed a prototype that would 1) emphasise the unique aspects of organic farming, 2) engage users with the nuances of the production process, and 3) create emotional attachment by giving them symbolic ownership on the trees of the farm. The idea had been found to have potential by the farm owner, and other ideas were proposed to improve the design for a broader demographic (such as families) and for considering different visual styles. The effectiveness of such a system needs to be further tested to understand if the proposed concepts and the prototype can meet the project’s aims. Still, our current progress informs the field about one of the possible ways to gamify sustainable and organic agriculture. The project would benefit from being evaluated concerning these aspects: organisation, quality of content, use of acquired knowledge, development and use of gamification, and innovation. We believe the discussions raised in Mindtrek 2022 can help further develop the project.

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Ngoc Nguyen