A Study on Gamification Effectiveness

Abstract

Studies have shown that gamification increases motivation and user experience when it comes to a certain behavior or completing a process. Gamification is often deeply associated with naı̈ve animations and stylized text. This paper addresses the effect that visual representation has on the motivation of a subject by measuring their motivation after completing a mundane process, with both entertaining gamification elements as well as gamification elements presented in plain text. For the purposes of this study a within subject design was used to gather data. Participants completed the same mundane task three times, once without any gamification elements, once with pragmatic feedback and once with entertaining feedback. After completion, the participants filled out the same Likert scale survey. The results, evaluated using the Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks test method, indicated that there was not a significant difference in user motivation between the visually stylized and plain text feedback. If conducted on a larger scale, this discovery could lead to a reduction in both time and cost for gamification development.