Beyond Riding: Passenger Engagement with Driver Labor through Gamified Interactions

Modern cities increasingly rely on ridesharing services for on-demand transportation, which offer consumers convenience and mobility across the globe. However, these marketed consumer affordances give rise to burdens and vulnerabilities that drivers shoulder alone, without adequate infrastructures for labor regulations or consumer-led advocacy. To effectively and sustainably advance protections and oversight for drivers, consumers must first be aware of the labor, logistics and costs involved with ridehail driving. To motivate consumers to practice more socially responsible consumption behaviors and foster solidarity with drivers, we explore the potential for gamified in-ride interactions to facilitate engagement with real (and lived) driver experiences. Through nine workshops with 19 drivers and 15 passengers, we surface how gamified in-ride interactions revealed passenger knowledge gaps around latent ridehail conditions, prompt reflection and shifts in perception of their relative power and consumption behaviors, and highlight drivers’ preferences for creating more immersive and contextualized service experiences, and identify opportunities to design safe and appropriate passenger-driver interactions that motivate solidarity with drivers. In sum, we advance conceptual understandings of in-ride social and managerial relations, demonstrate potential for future worker advocacy in algorithmically-managed labor, and offer design guidelines for more human-centered workplace technologies.

💡 Research Summary

This paper investigates the potential of gamified in-ride interactions to bridge the awareness gap between rideshare passengers and drivers, with the ultimate goal of fostering passenger solidarity and advocacy for improved driver working conditions. The research is grounded in the critical observation that while platform companies market convenience to consumers, the burdens and vulnerabilities of rideshare labor fall solely on drivers, exacerbated by a lack of regulatory infrastructure and consumer awareness.

The authors argue that for driver protections to advance sustainably, consumers must first become cognizant of the hidden logistics, costs, and labor involved in ridehail driving. To motivate socially responsible consumption and solidarity, the study explores gamification as a tool to facilitate engagement with drivers’ lived experiences within the time-constrained and socially ambiguous context of a ride.

Employing an iterative design process, the researchers developed six gamified prototypes based on insights from prior literature and formative interviews. These prototypes aimed to embed latent ridehail concepts such as pay structures, algorithmic management pressures, and long-term health impacts. They then conducted nine co-design workshops involving 19 drivers and 15 passengers (in separate sessions) to gather feedback on these interventions.

The findings reveal three key insights:

1. Passenger Knowledge Gaps and Gamification’s Role: Workshops confirmed significant passenger ignorance regarding critical aspects of driving labor, including actual earnings after expenses, the severe consequences of low passenger ratings, and long-term physical tolls like musculoskeletal disorders. The gamified interventions showed early promise in mediating deeper driver-passenger interactions by making these opaque issues tangible and prompting reflection on passengers’ relative power and consumption habits.
2. Driver Preferences for Interaction: Drivers expressed a strong preference for game experiences that were not generic but instead “immersive and contextualized,” incorporating their personal stories, specific city challenges, and unique driving contexts. This highlights that fostering genuine solidarity requires moving beyond abstract labor facts to connect with individual human experiences.
3. Design Trade-offs and Opportunities: The study identified crucial design considerations for future passenger-driver technologies, emphasizing the need for “safe and appropriate” interactions that do not compromise physical safety, create social awkwardness, or distract from driving. It also outlined the opportunity to design interactions that could scale from raising awareness to motivating concrete advocacy actions among passengers.

In conclusion, the research advances the conceptual understanding of in-ride social dynamics, demonstrates a novel pathway for worker advocacy in algorithmically managed labor by leveraging consumer power, and provides practical design guidelines for creating more human-centered workplace technologies in the gig economy.