The paper “A Gamified App to promote Senior Cyclo-Tourism: A Pilot Study” was awarded with best Paper Award, at the International Conference on Simulation and AI in Games GAME ON’2020, held at the University of Aveiro, Portugal.

From 24 to 25 of September 2020, academics and industry practitioners in Games were gathered to discuss such topics as Game Design, Artificial Intelligence in Games, Game Mechanics, Game-Player Interaction and Real-World Gamification.

The authors of the aforementioned paper are Cláudia Ortet and her supervisor team Ana Isabel Veloso and Liliana Vale Costa. The research work was carried out under the SEDUCE 2.0 project, which aims to identify a set of gamification strategies to motivate senior citizens to adhere to cyclotourism.

The paper presented at the conference reports on the use of the Development Research Method, deploying a broad array of methods, including focus groups, eye-tracking and interviews. A total of 46 participants (7 focus group participants, 8 participants in eye-tracking and 31 cyclists’ interviewees) were involved in this research. Based on the literature review, related work and the insights from each method, a cyclo-tourism digital app entitled Jizo was co-designed and prototyped.

Findings indicate that certain gamification techniques and elements can trigger senior citizens’ motivations towards cyclo-tourism, being essential integrative parts of a digital app in this context. The elements highlighted were social relationships, progression, challenges, competition, feedback and rewards, having an important role in pre-, in loco and post- experience. These data support the view on gamification capability to motivate senior cyclo-tourism.