In 2010, the World Bank sponsored a gamification project based in South Africa and involved people from 150 other countries. The link above to the lessons learned discussion offers many great ideas and observations that gamification designers can use.
EVOKE was developed by the World Bank Institute, the learning and knowledge arm of the World Bank Group, and directed by alternate reality game master Jane McGonigal. EVOKE is for all ages; recommended age 13 and up.
“EVOKE is a ten-week crash course in changing the world. It is free to play and open to anyone, anywhere. The goal of the social network game is to help empower people all over the world to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems. ”
Over ten weeks participants developed local solutions to complex social problems. Survey and interview responses indicate that:
“These players were likely to increase their sense of agency in relation to future actions , their awareness of and engagement with social, environmental and economic challenges, and their knowledge in relation to these challenges and to potential solutions.”
One outstanding result from this project was that the use of game elements attracted twice the number of young people than other World Bank website resources on social issues. The quests covered in the game were: secret identity, motivation, environment, amazing stories, pivotal moment, call to action, opposition, superhero symbol, secret allies and news from the future.