Optimal Design of Serious Games for Consumer Engagement in the Smart Grid

Serious games are a promising approach for demand-side management that aims to higher user engagement and active participation. In this paper, 1 we introduce the problem of optimal serious-game design for achieving specific energy-consumption reduction goals. We consider a serious game, where a serious-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 serious game are the user discomfort due to demand load reduction, the user desire for social approval and the user sensitivity to social outcasting. We formulate the problems of the serious-game designer as an operational-cost minimization one for the utility company and that of each consumer as a utility-maximization one. The serious-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.