Unveiling the Mediating Role of Environmental Awareness: A Study on Gamified Rewards

Gamification is part of modern mobile applications that serves as a design element. The reward element in gamification has a positive role in stimulating the behavioural intentions of the users. Having said that, plenty of virtual and physical gamified rewards can be found in Ant Forest – a popular large-scale mobile pro-environmental application in China. In particular, Ant Forest promotes environmental awareness and motivation among its players attributable to its excellent application of gamified rewards to pro-environmental behaviour of afforestation. This study applied the Stimuli-Organism-Response (S-O-R) Model to construct a theoretical framework with the variables of gamified rewards, environmental awareness and motivation, and specifically focused on the mediating effect of environmental awareness. By using the stratified proportional sampling technique, 621 Ant Forest users from six cities in China were surveyed to determine the role of users’ environmental awareness using the Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) approach. The study outcomes disclosed that gamified rewards in Ant Forest had a positive and strong impact on the environmental awareness of the users, while environmental awareness displayed a positive and strong impact on the environmental motivation of the users. Nonetheless, gamified rewards did not directly influence environmental motivation. Given the key finding that environmental awareness exhibited a strong mediation effect, it emerged as a key element that linked gamified rewards with environmental motivation among users. Imminently, the application scope of the S-O-R Model is expanded in this study. In doing so, the significance of environmental awareness among users is highlighted for the relationship between gamified reward and environmental motivation. In addition, this study provides feasible suggestions for developers of environmental applications to design effective gamification strategies by reasonably stimulating users’ environmental awareness.