Collective attention and active consumer participation in community energy systems

Community energy systems, which rely on demand-side self-organisation of energy distribution, can encounter situations in which demand exceeds supply, and unless the community members schedule energy usage by and between themselves, there will be a blackout. This is effectively a collective action dilemma typically modelled as a repeated game and analysed using Game Theory. In this paper, we investigate the situation from an empirical (rather than analytic) perspective using instead a Serious Game. Motivated firstly by Elinor Ostrom’s institutional design principles for sustainable common-pool resource management, and secondly by the idea that collective attention is a prerequisite for successful collective action, we present the design and implementation of a Serious Game which both encapsulates (some of) the design principles and promotes collective attention within the game’s interface, affordances and interactions. Our experimental results show that as more interface design features which promote collective attention are enabled, then more often successful collective action is observed. These results have, we argue, important implications for Smart Meter design and roll-out programmes, as well as leveraging the active participation of prosumers in innovative operational and management principles for future Smart Grids.