The Role of Gamification in Motivation

• Rewards increase engagement: Engagement gets fueled when users are being rewarded with points, badges, and leader boards. In short, the rewarding of instant feedback to the process of flourishing accomplishments gives the pleasure that keeps giving, and it propels the user to keep going. This is why gamification elements are integrated with apps like fitness trackers or productivity tools.
• Achievement and Mastery: There is an assurance of being triumphant in the achievement of raising oneself through a series of levels, through a march of challenges, and via a roster of achievements. This taps into our intrinsic desire for mastery. For example, when a person scores points or levels up in a game, self-confidence is improved, along with intrinsic motivation. For instance, Duolingo has gamified learning systems that induce users to keep practicing the language through rewarding continued effort.
• Social Motivation and Competition: In gamification, leader boards and sharing functions provide a means of encouraging friendliness, competition and social sharing. People often desire to outdo others, to be recognized, or to collaborate in the context of a community. This occurs in the workplace, where teams work hard to out-compete one another based on rewards or recognition, thus fostering team spirit and collective motivation.
• Enhanced stamina due to challenges: Typically, gamified platforms throw in increasing levels of difficulty so that users will feel challenged without ending up crumbling under said challenge of a task. The challanging approach ensures persistence. In education, gamification provides emphasis on rather fun and competitive forms of learning, where students find that engaging in a long plodding exercise actually turns out to be possible since it is a blast.
• Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Motivation: While extrinsic rewards, such as points, trophies, etc., help drive soaring interest for a limited time, it is the ultimate goal of gamification to cultivate intrinsic motivation. This is when tasks are so enjoyable that one does them for the task’s very own sake, say completing a puzzle or crafting a project. Great gamified systems seize onto this deeper motivation and make the activity very personally rewarding beyond any external rewards.