The digital transformations of the modern society often outstrip the processes of science transformation, forcing science to constantly improve both technologies and applied software. The phenomenon especially characterizes scientific studies in research areas such as the Digital Economy and the Smart City. In order to the urban environment becomes smarter, gamification technologies act as the motivational mechanisms, maintaining citizens' social activity and stimulating social growth. The purpose of the paper is an identification of development trends of gamification in the context of the sociocultural urban information space. Comparative analysis results of the publications' number, Russian scientific discourse about considered subject domains as well as its correspondence to the global trends are presented. The study has applied the synthetic method for the automated extraction and explication of contextual knowledge from an array of textual modality resources.