What is this article about?

Many professionals now use games’ motivational characteristics and want to apply them to non-gaming contexts to stimulate user engagement. This is called “gamification”, which is defined as: “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts”. Studies have shown that some game elements can stimulate user behaviour in different contexts, but others have cautioned against the use of these elements. For the latter, the argument is that it may diminish users’ intrinsic interest and lead them to stop engaging with the application or service.

Psychological studies have shown that certain forms of rewards and feedback can indeed have a detrimental effect on intrinsic motivation, and this may also be true in gamification. However, if game elements are applied in an appropriate way, this may lead to increased intrinsic motivation of the users, by satisfying their psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Therefore, to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying gamification better, the effects of individual game design should be studied in relation to motivation. There are only a few studies which examined the effects of individual game elements on motivation and performance. In this article, the self-determination theory (SDT) framework is used to address research gaps. Specifically, this article describes how points, leaderboards and levels affect need satisfaction, intrinsic motivation and performance in an image annotation task. Individual differences will also be discussed.

What is the theoretical background?

Intrinsic motivation, cognitive evaluation, and causality orientation

According to SDT, there are two forms of motivation: extrinsic motivation (doing something to gain a reward such as money or praise), and intrinsic motivation (doing something because it is enjoyable). These are the most frequently discussed types of motivation, but they are empirically rarely studied in gamification research. Both types promote performance, but only the latter improves psychological well-being, creativity, and learning outcomes.

According to the cognitive evaluation theory, the effects of extrinsic rewards are mediated by a person’s perception of these events as informational or controlling. This determines how the events influence the psychological needs for competence and autonomy. Competence is described as the perceived extent of one’s own actions as the cause of the desired consequences. When individuals are given informational feedback (direct and positive), this drives the need for competence. Feelings of competence can drive intrinsic motivation only when there is a sense of autonomy: people must feel that they determined their own behavior, and not someone else. When they feel like they are controlled by someone else, positive feedback may hinder people’s need for autonomy and decrease intrinsic motivation. According to causality orientation theory, a sub-theory of SDT, people differ in the degree of experiencing their actions as self-determined. This influences whether people perceive feedback as informational or controlling. Therefore, a person’s causality orientation is a moderator of the effects of feedback on need satisfaction. Autonomy-oriented individuals are more likely to act according to their own interests and values and are more likely to interpret external events as informational rather than controlling and they thus experience more satisfaction in their competence needs. In contrast, control-oriented people are more likely to act due to external demands and perceive external events as pressuring and experience lower feelings of autonomy.

Need satisfaction and game design elements

Points, levels, and leaderboards are key elements in gamification, because they are related to digital games and are applicable in different non-game contexts. Zagal and colleagues (2005) define these as game metrics: all three are used to keep track of and provide feedback on player performance in games. They can also function as positive, informational feedback and can increase gamers’ motivation because they satisfy the need for competence. However, the discussed studies all took place in form of a group collaboration setting with 50 students per session, and it could be argued that the informational feedback provided in these studies was worded in a manner that could have been perceived as being controlling by some, and informational by others. Also, intrinsic motivation was not measured, and it is unclear as to what affects intrinsic motivation and how this in turn relates to performance.

What is the goal of this study?

In the current paper, the aim is to expand upon existing research by studying the effects of points, levels, and leaderboards on participants’ performance and motivation in an image annotation task.

What are their findings?

The researchers looked at how points, leaderboards, and levels increase performance, competence need satisfaction and intrinsic motivation in an image annotation task. They also took the participants’ causality orientation into account. They found that these game elements did promote user behaviour, especially levels and the leaderboard prompted participants to generate significantly more tags. However, the quality of tags were not affected. The different conditions (plain, points, leaderboard, levels) did not differ in their intrinsic motivation, competence need satisfaction. Participants’ control orientation also did not influence the effects of game elements on performance, need satisfaction or intrinsic motivation. Autonomy-oriented participants did report more intrinsic motivation than control oriented participants, and also produced more tags. Intrinsic motivation was also correlated with autonomy and competence need satisfaction and with tag quality.

Game elements and performance

The goal metrics of points, levels, and leaderboards stimulate performance by communicating how many tags have been generated. This sets explicit goals for participants to aspire to. In their experiment, the authors found that these game metrics did lead to more tags (tag quantity). However, tag quantity was negatively correlated with tag quality. This means that the more tags participant made, the less the quality of these tags were. Participants in the gamified conditions thus created more tags than in the plain conditions, but the quality of the tags were comparable. Overall, it seemed that participants in gamified conditions performed better than participants in the plain condition, who were not presented with any game elements. Furthermore, tag quantity was slightly correlated with intrinsic motivation, but participants’ reported intrinsic motivation did not reflect their performance. This could mean that in the current study, the game elements functioned as extrinsic rewards. This is not necessarily a bad thing: it leads to overall better performance, but as noted, only intrinsic motivation increases the extent and quality of effort that people put into a given task.

Effects on competence need satisfaction and intrinsic motivation

None of the game elements affected intrinsic motivation or need satisfaction, and it was thus also not moderated by participants’ causality orientation. In contrast to expectations, game elements were not perceived as informational, and did not lead to more feelings of competence or intrinsic motivation compared to the plain condition. This means that points, levels, and leaderboards do not satisfy competence need satisfaction, even in a non-controlling setting. The authors explain that this might be, because participants did not receive enough meaningful information that they could use to judge their performance. Even though the elements are informational, there was no explicit indication of what was a “good” performance. With regard to motivation, the current image annotation task was not challenging. Therefore it could be that the game elements only satisfy competence needs for tasks that are experienced as challenging. Furthermore, in this study the game elements were not “juicy”. In games, there is often a lot of this “juicy” feedback, in terms of sounds, visuals, and animations. Also, in the current study, participants were only scored for tag quantity, and did not receive feedback on whether the tag was fitting or not. If this would have been rewarded, this could have increased the challenge of the task.

What can be concluded?

In this study, points, levels, and leaderboards increased tag quality, but did not affect intrinsic motivation, need satisfaction or tag quality. This suggests that they were regarded as extrinsic motivations. However, they did also not impair intrinsic motivation, and this shows that these game elements may be effective means for promoting performance quantity. There is more research needed on why particular game elements act as extrinsic or intrinsic motivators in different contexts, and how this shapes user enjoyment and behavior.