[Paper] A Longitudinal Analysis of Gamification in Untappd: Ethical Reflections on a Social Drinking Application

Source: arXiv - 2601.04841v1

Overview

The paper delivers a five‑year longitudinal study of Untappd, the popular social app that turns beer drinking into a game with badges, streaks, and leaderboards. By revisiting the platform in 2025 (after an initial exploratory study in 2020), the authors examine how its gamification mechanics have (or haven’t) evolved from an ethical standpoint, and they argue that ethical reflection must become a first‑class citizen in the software development lifecycle.

Key Contributions

• Longitudinal ethical audit of a real‑world, consumer‑facing app across a five‑year span.
• Taxonomy of badge categories (e.g., “Exploration,” “Quantity,” “Social,” “Risky‑Behavior,” “Community”) and their impact on user autonomy and well‑being.
• Mapping of traditional ethical theories (deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics) onto concrete software‑engineering practices.
• Evidence that superficial UI tweaks (e.g., disclaimer pop‑ups) do not resolve deeper design‑induced ethical concerns.
• Actionable framework for embedding continuous ethical reflection into agile/scrum pipelines.

Methodology

1. Data Collection (2020 & 2025):
   • Scraped public badge data, user streaks, and activity logs from Untappd’s API (respecting rate limits and privacy policies).
   • Conducted semi‑structured interviews with 30 active users and 5 product designers.
2. Badge Classification:
   • Applied qualitative coding to group 112 distinct badges into five thematic categories.
3. Ethical Analysis:
   • Leveraged a hybrid lens: classic ethical theory (Kantian duty, utilitarian outcomes, virtue ethics) + the Software Engineering Code of Ethics (IEEE/ACM).
   • Evaluated each badge category against criteria such as autonomy, non‑maleficence, beneficence, and justice.
4. Longitudinal Comparison:
   • Tracked changes in badge design, UI prompts, and policy statements between the two snapshots, quantifying “ethical drift” via a custom scoring rubric.

Results & Findings

*Score reflects alignment with ethical criteria (higher = better).

• Core ethical issues persisted: Badges that reward high alcohol consumption or risky drinking times remained largely unchanged, merely wrapped in superficial warnings.
• User autonomy erosion: Streak mechanics nudged users to maintain daily drinking habits, subtly pressuring them into potentially harmful patterns.
• Design inertia: Even after internal policy updates, the gamified reward structures continued to promote the same behaviors, indicating a gap between ethical intent and implementation.

Practical Implications

• Design Teams: Treat gamification elements as behavioral interventions that require the same rigor as security or privacy features. Incorporate ethical impact assessments early in sprint planning.
• Product Managers: Use the paper’s badge taxonomy to audit existing reward systems—identify “high‑risk” categories (Quantity, Risky‑Behavior) and consider redesigning or de‑emphasizing them.
• Developers: Implement feature toggles for ethically sensitive badges, allowing rapid rollback if adverse effects surface. Log badge‑earned events with consent‑aware telemetry to enable post‑deployment monitoring.
• Regulators & Platform Owners: The study provides a concrete case for continuous compliance checks (e.g., against consumer‑protection statutes) rather than one‑off audits.
• Open‑Source Communities: The authors release their classification schema and scoring rubric under an MIT license, enabling other apps (fitness, finance, education) to self‑audit gamified incentives.

Limitations & Future Work

• Scope confined to a single app and its public data; findings may not generalize across different cultural contexts or platforms with closed ecosystems.
• Self‑reported user data could be biased; the study relied on voluntary interview participants rather than a random sample.
• Ethical scoring rubric is inherently subjective; while validated with expert panels, it may need refinement for other domains.

Future research directions suggested include: expanding the longitudinal framework to multiple gamified services, integrating automated sentiment analysis of user‑generated content to detect emerging harms, and developing tooling that embeds ethical scoring directly into CI/CD pipelines.

Authors

• Jefferson Seide Molléri
• Sami Hyrynsalmi
• Antti Hakkala
• Kai K. Kimppa
• Jouni Smed

Paper Information

• arXiv ID: 2601.04841v1
• Categories: cs.SE
• Published: January 8, 2026
• PDF: Download PDF