As energy demands surge across ICT infrastructures, service providers must engage users in sustainable practices while maintaining the Quality of Experience (QoE) at acceptable levels. In this paper, we introduce such an approach, leveraging gamified incentives and a model for user's acceptance on incentives, thus encouraging energy-efficient behaviors such as adaptive bitrate streaming. Each user is characterized by an environmental sensitivity factor and a private incentive threshold, shaping probabilistic responses to energy-saving offers. A serious-game mechanism based on positive behavioral reinforcement and rewards of the users, due to their inclusion in top-K and bottom-M rankings, fosters peer comparison and competition, thus transforming passive acceptance into active engagement. Moreover, within a Stackelberg game formulation, the video streaming service provider--acting as the strategic leader--optimizes both incentive levels and game parameters to achieve network-wide energy and traffic reductions, while adhering to budgetary constraints. This structured approach empowers providers with proactive, application-level control over energy consumption, offering them measurable benefits such as reduced high-bitrate traffic and increased participation in energy-saving behaviors, while also considering user satisfaction. The results of our simulations show that indeed gamification boosts significantly user participation and energy savings provided that the incentive and game parameters are chosen optimally.

翻译：随着信息通信技术基础设施的能源需求激增，服务提供商必须在维持可接受水平的体验质量（QoE）的同时，促使用户参与可持续实践。本文提出了一种方法，利用游戏化激励机制及用户对激励的接受度模型，从而鼓励自适应比特率流媒体等节能行为。每个用户由环境敏感度因子和私有激励阈值表征，这塑造了其对节能提议的概率性响应。一个基于积极行为强化的严肃游戏机制，通过将用户纳入前K名与后M名排名进行奖励，促进了同伴比较与竞争，从而将被动接受转化为主动参与。此外，在一个Stackelberg博弈框架内，视频流媒体服务提供商作为战略领导者，优化激励水平与游戏参数，以实现全网范围的能源与流量削减，同时遵守预算约束。这种结构化方法赋予提供商在应用层面对能源消耗进行主动控制的能力，为其带来可量化的收益，例如减少高比特率流量、提高节能行为参与率，同时也考虑了用户满意度。我们的仿真结果表明，只要激励与游戏参数得到优化选择，游戏化确实能显著提升用户参与度与节能效果。