Optimal design of serious games for demand side management

Serious games are a promising approach for demand-side management that aims to higher user engagement and active participation. In this paper1, we introduce the problem of optimal serious-game design for achieving specific energy-consumption reduction goals. We consider a serious game, where a game designer entity presents publicly to all consumers a list of top-K consumers and a list of bottom-M consumers according to their respective energy-consumption reduction at peak hours. The driving forces of this game are the user discomfort due to demand load shifting, the user desire for social approval and the user sensitivity to social outcasting. According to their private values to these parameters, users compete to enter the top-K list and be recognized for their achievement, or to avoid ending up in the bottom-M list and become pinpointed for not being energy-friendly. We formulate the problems of the game designer as an operational-cost minimization one for the utility company and that of each consumer as a utility-maximization one. The game-design problem is to decide on K, M and on the feedback provided to the consumers, while the consumer-side problem amounts to selecting the behavioral change to energy consumption that maximizes the expected user utility. By a series of simulations, we show how the choices of K, M affect the energy consumption reduction for different types of customers.