Gamification rewards that resonate: Some points about point systems

There is a difference between a question like “What’s the point?” and “What are the points for?” but either way, they are one of the worst signs a gamification initiative may not resonate with users.

At the Gamification 2013 conference in Stratford, Ont. a few months ago, University of Basel researcher Elisa Mekler discussed a project that attempted to hone in on what effect points, leaderboards and other reward systems really have.

“I’ve had my fair share of experiences where I got turned off that (a gamification program) manipulated me to attain certain rewards,” she told the audience, “where it felt very hollow and empty.”

In an experiment, Mekler and her team set up study participants with an image matching game, where players were shown paintings and asked to describe the moods the paintings evoked. This was seen as akin to tagging images on social media channels like Facebook or Instagram, Mekler said. Participants were scored on how many tags they generated, not how well they did.

“The gaming conditions yielded significantly more performance in the annotation task,” she said, adding that there were some nuances in the results. For example, leaderboard and level positions significantly outperformed points. That said, Mekler said there was  no significant effect of the gamification elements on users’ instrinic motivation, their level of autonomy and competence. “It didn’t matter if they got points or not. They just found (playing the game) quite interesting,” she said.

Download the complete research, Disassembling gamification: The effect of points and meaning on user motivation and performance, to learn more about the work of Mekler’s team and where the research is headed next.