Gamification

What it is

The standard academic definition, "the use of game design elements in non-game contexts", comes from Deterding and colleagues in 2011. The term itself spread from around 2010. In marketing, gamification appears in loyalty tiers, progress badges, streak counters and leaderboards in apps.

Self-determination theory gives the clearest way to judge it. Game elements can support competence by reporting progress, relatedness by connecting people, and autonomy by offering choice. They can also act as plain rewards, which the theory predicts will do less for lasting motivation.

In effect

Two experiments published in 2017 show the split. Michael Sailer and colleagues found in a randomised online experiment that badges, leaderboards and performance graphs raised people's sense of competence and their sense that the task was meaningful, while avatars, stories and teammates raised their sense of relatedness. An attempt to raise their sense of freedom of decision did not work.

Elisa Mekler and colleagues gave 273 people an image-tagging task with points, levels, a leaderboard or none of these. The game elements did not change felt competence or intrinsic motivation, but levels and the leaderboard produced more tags. The authors concluded that the elements worked as extrinsic incentives for the quantity of work.

The difference may lie in what an element reports. A badge for a real skill tells people they are improving; a badge for logging in rewards turning up.

What it does not say

Gamification is not reliably positive. Reviews of gamification in learning find small to moderate benefits with wide variation and weak evidence that they last. It is also not reliably harmful: the failures come mainly from rewards that replace interest people already had, rather than from game elements as such.

The main lesson for product design is to make game elements report genuine progress, if the aim is engagement that lasts beyond the reward.

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