The word gamification creates a slightly misleading first impression. If we are gamifying something, it sounds as though we must be turning it into a game: adding points to a learning platform, creating a leaderboard for employees, giving customers badges for completing actions, or perhaps adding an avatar and a few levels to an application. These are certainly things that gamified systems sometimes do, but identifying gamification through these visible elements is a little like defining board games as products that contain cards, dice and wooden pieces. The components may be there, but they tell us very little about the design behind them.
Gamification does not require us to turn an existing activity into a game. A bank remains a bank after we gamify part of its customer experience, just as an educational platform remains a learning environment and a rehabilitation program remains a medical process. The participant still has a real-world reason for being there, and the organization still has a real-world outcome it wants to achieve. What changes is the way the experience is designed around that activity.
The most widely used academic definition comes from Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled and Lennart Nacke, who defined gamification in 2011 as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts.” It is a remarkably useful definition precisely because it draws a boundary between designing a game and learning from game design. We are not necessarily importing a complete game into another environment; we are taking elements, structures and principles that games use successfully and applying them to an experience whose primary purpose lies somewhere else.
To understand why that distinction matters, however, it helps to spend a little time thinking about games themselves.
What Games Have Been Teaching Us for Thousands of Years
Games are far older than gamification, and attempts to explain what exactly makes something a game are also much older than the term. Philosophers and researchers have approached the question from very different directions. Johan Huizinga, writing in Homo Ludens in 1938, emphasized the voluntary nature of play and its separation from ordinary life, while Ludwig Wittgenstein famously used games to demonstrate how difficult it can be to create a single definition that captures every member of a broad category. Chess, football, hide-and-seek and a child’s imaginary game may all clearly be games, even though finding one set of characteristics that applies neatly to all of them is surprisingly difficult.
For the purposes of gamification, though, one definition is particularly useful. In The Grasshopper, philosopher Bernard Suits described playing a game as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
It is a wonderfully compact definition because it captures something that happens constantly in games and would normally make very little sense outside them. If the purpose of football were simply to move a ball into a goal, allowing players to pick it up and carry it would make the task much easier. Instead, we voluntarily accept a restriction that makes achieving the objective more difficult. Golf would be much easier if we could carry the ball to the hole, chess would be much easier if our pieces could move wherever we wanted them to, and countless board games would become trivial if we were allowed to take the resources we needed instead of following the systems that regulate how we acquire them.
Games deliberately place obstacles between us and a goal, and then make overcoming those obstacles part of the reason we want to continue.
This is closely connected to something games must ultimately provide: fun. That does not mean that every second of a game needs to be pleasant, amusing or comfortable. A game can frustrate us, frighten us, exhaust us or force us to concentrate intensely, and there are experiences that we only recognize as enjoyable when we look back at them after they are over. Fun is a much more complicated phenomenon than immediate pleasure. Nevertheless, if playing repeatedly produces no experience that we value, there is eventually very little reason to choose to play.
Games have therefore spent thousands of years developing ways of making voluntary experiences worth continuing. They give us goals, restrict our actions, create uncertainty, provide feedback, allow us to improve, confront us with meaningful decisions and make progress visible. They create social relationships between participants, sometimes through cooperation and sometimes through competition, and they continually manipulate the relationship between what we want, what we are capable of doing and what stands in our way.
Gamification begins when we ask what we can learn from all of that.
A Game and a Gamified Experience Have Different Reasons to Exist
When I design a board game, the game itself is the product. People sit down to play because they expect the experience of playing to justify the time and attention they are about to invest in it. The game may be educational, social, competitive, emotionally challenging or intellectually demanding, but if the experience itself consistently fails to provide value, the player has little reason to return.
A gamified system usually begins somewhere else. There is already an activity we want people to perform or an experience we want to improve, and that activity exists for reasons that have nothing to do with games.
An online store may want more customers who place products in their carts to complete their purchases. A learning platform may want students to complete more lessons and retain more of what they learn. A company may want employees to finish an onboarding process rather than abandoning it halfway through, while a fitness application may be interested in helping users maintain a routine over several months rather than exercising intensely for a week and disappearing.
In each case, the real objective remains outside the gameful layer. The organization has a behavior or outcome it cares about, often expressed through a KPI, and gamification is one possible way of redesigning the experience around that objective.
This distinction changes where the design process should begin. If I am asked to gamify an online store with a high rate of abandoned shopping carts, my first question should not be whether customers should receive points for completing their purchases. Before choosing any mechanic, I need to understand why they are leaving. Perhaps the checkout process is confusing, perhaps unexpected shipping costs appear at the final stage, perhaps customers do not trust the payment system, or perhaps they are simply using the cart as a convenient place to save products they might want later. These are very different problems, and placing the same point system on top of all of them would make very little sense.
The correct starting point is therefore not What game element should I add? but What behavior am I trying to affect, what currently prevents or discourages that behavior, and what kind of experience would make it easier or more worthwhile?
Only after answering those questions does game design become useful.
Why Points, Badges and Leaderboards Are Not Enough
One reason gamification is so often misunderstood is that we naturally identify it through its most visible components. Points are easy to see, badges are easy to explain and leaderboards make a system immediately look more game-like, so these elements have gradually become almost synonymous with gamification.
The problem is that none of them tells us whether the underlying system is well designed.
Consider a point. On its own, it is simply a number attached to an action, and adding ten points whenever an employee completes a task does not tell us what those points are supposed to accomplish. They might communicate progress toward a larger objective, provide feedback about performance, create a resource that the employee can later spend, unlock new possibilities, establish status inside a group or allow the participant to compare today’s performance with their own previous results. Each of those functions creates a different experience, even though all of them could appear on the screen as exactly the same “+10.”
The same is true of leaderboards. They are often introduced because competition can motivate people, but competition only works when the comparison remains meaningful. A participant who is three positions below the leader may see a reason to improve, while someone ranked 437th against a leader whose score is ten times higher may receive a completely different message: the competition is effectively over, even though the system continues asking them to participate.
Nothing about the leaderboard itself tells us which of those experiences we have created.
This is why good gamification cannot be designed by copying the visible furniture of games. Games do not become engaging because they contain points, resources, levels or rewards; those elements become meaningful because of the relationships the system creates between them. A resource becomes interesting when using it for one purpose means giving up another opportunity. A level matters when reaching it represents something the player understands or changes what they are capable of doing. A score matters when it provides information that influences future behavior. Even a simple progress bar can function very differently depending on whether it clarifies an achievable goal, creates pressure to finish an incomplete task or merely decorates an interface.
The real work therefore happens one level below the mechanic itself, in understanding what experience and behavior that mechanic creates.
Gamification Is a Design Process, Not a Decoration Layer
The classic definition of gamification as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts remains useful, but taken too literally it can encourage an ingredient-based approach: find an existing activity, select several familiar elements from games, attach them to the activity and call the result gamification.
A more useful way to think about the field is as a design process.
We begin with an existing activity and try to understand it from the participant’s perspective. Where is progress difficult to see? At what point do people tend to stop? Which parts of the process create uncertainty or frustration? Does the participant know what success looks like? Do they receive feedback quickly enough to understand what they did well and what they should change? Are there meaningful choices, or does the experience simply instruct them to follow a sequence of actions? Does the system provide a reason to return after the first interaction?
Once we understand the friction, we can begin looking at the enormous collection of solutions that game design has developed for similar problems. A distant goal might become a sequence of smaller milestones. An invisible improvement might become visible progress. A repetitive activity might gain meaningful choices. A lonely process might become social. A failure that currently feels like a dead end might instead provide information that makes the next attempt better.
Some of those solutions may eventually involve points, levels, challenges, collections, streaks, resources or rewards, but the mechanic is the result of the design process rather than its starting point.
This also means that gamification should rarely be treated as something we install once and consider finished. Because the purpose of the intervention is to influence an existing experience or behavior, we need to observe what actually happens after it is introduced. A leaderboard might increase activity among the highest-performing participants while discouraging everyone else. A reward might create a dramatic short-term increase in participation but make the activity less attractive once the reward disappears. A progression system might encourage people to complete more actions while accidentally teaching them to optimize for quantity instead of quality.
If our original goal was to improve a particular KPI, measuring that KPI is only the beginning. We also need to understand what behavior produced the change and what happened elsewhere in the system, because people respond to incentives in ways that are not always identical to what the designer intended.
That iterative process of identifying a problem, designing an intervention, observing behavior and redesigning the system is much closer to what professional gamification actually looks like than choosing a set of game mechanics from a list.
Gamification Can Support Motivation, but It Cannot Manufacture It
There is an attractive assumption hiding behind many unsuccessful gamification projects: games are motivating, therefore adding elements from games to an activity will make that activity motivating as well. The problem is that motivation cannot simply be attached to an experience from the outside.
If an employee believes a task is pointless, giving them a badge for completing it does not solve the underlying problem. If a student believes an objective is impossible, a progress bar may simply provide a more precise visualization of how far away success feels. If customers are frustrated because a process is unnecessarily complicated, adding a reward for surviving the process may be less effective than simply fixing the process.
This becomes even more important in situations where participation is not genuinely voluntary. Suits’ definition works so well for games partly because of that first word: voluntary. We agree to accept the unnecessary obstacle. In workplaces, schools, healthcare systems and many other environments in which gamification is used, the participant may not have the same freedom to walk away. An employee still has to complete the required training, a student may still have to submit the assignment, and a patient may still need to perform an unpleasant rehabilitation exercise.
Gamification does not make those obligations disappear, but game design can change how people experience them. It can create meaningful choices within an unavoidable process, make a difficult objective feel achievable by dividing it into understandable steps, provide immediate feedback instead of leaving people uncertain about their performance, or make improvement visible when it would otherwise be difficult to notice. It can create social support, clarify goals and help participants understand the consequences of their decisions.
None of those things guarantees motivation, but they give motivation something to work with.
This is also why the interests of the organization and the participant cannot be separated completely. The organization naturally wants the participant to behave in a certain way; otherwise there would be no reason to invest in gamification. At the same time, a sustainable system should give the participant something meaningful in return, whether that is greater clarity, a stronger sense of progress, more useful feedback, greater control over the experience, social connection or simply more fun.
When those interests align, gamification can improve both the metric and the experience that produces it. When they do not, the system may still change behavior temporarily, but calling that success becomes much more complicated.
What Gamification Cannot Fix
The enthusiasm surrounding gamification has sometimes encouraged organizations to treat it as a solution to problems that have very little to do with game design. If users are leaving, perhaps we need a loyalty system. If employees are disengaged, perhaps we need a leaderboard. If students are not completing lessons, perhaps we need badges.
Sometimes one of those ideas may genuinely help, but gamification cannot compensate indefinitely for a product or process that fails at its basic purpose. A confusing checkout process should first become less confusing. A toxic workplace does not become healthy because employees earn points. A learning task that is far beyond the student’s current ability does not become achievable simply because the interface celebrates every attempt.
This is one of the reasons it is more useful to think of gamification as a multiplier than as a rescue operation. It can improve an experience that already has a reason to exist by making goals clearer, progress more visible, feedback more useful, decisions more meaningful or participation more engaging. It can help people maintain behaviors that are difficult to sustain and make processes that feel abstract or distant easier to understand.
What it cannot do reliably is create value where there was none to begin with.
Research into gamification reflects this complexity. Studies and meta-analyses have found positive effects in areas such as learning, motivation and behavioral engagement, but those effects vary considerably depending on the population, the context and, crucially, the way the gamified system was designed. Asking whether “gamification works” is therefore almost as broad as asking whether “game design works.” A much more useful question is which design principles work for which people, in which situation, and toward which objective.
That is also why measuring a gamification project matters so much. If we began by identifying the behavior we wanted to change, we should eventually return to that behavior and ask whether anything actually changed, whether the change was valuable and whether it produced unintended effects elsewhere. If the result is weak, the conclusion should not automatically be that gamification does not work, nor should we simply add more game elements. We need to return to the experience, reconsider our assumptions and iterate.
So What Is Gamification?
The easiest way to recognize gamification is through its mechanics, but I think the mechanics are actually the least interesting part of it.
Points, levels, leaderboards, challenges, quests, resources, collections, badges and streaks are tools. What matters is the design thinking that determines why one of those tools should exist, what behavior it is supposed to influence and what kind of experience it creates for the person using the system.
Games have spent an extraordinary amount of time exploring questions that also appear outside games. How do we make a distant goal feel achievable without making it trivial? How do we give people enough information to make a meaningful decision without removing uncertainty altogether? How do we communicate progress? How do we make failure informative enough that another attempt feels worthwhile? How do we create competition without making people who fall behind give up? How do we allow cooperation while preserving individual agency? How do we design challenges that remain interesting as people become better at them, and how do we make an experience enjoyable enough that someone wants to return?
None of those questions belongs exclusively to games. They also appear in education, product design, customer experience, healthcare, organizational behavior, marketing and countless other fields.
Gamification is what happens when we deliberately bring game design knowledge into those environments, not because we want to disguise them as games, but because games have accumulated an enormous amount of knowledge about human behavior inside designed systems.
The starting point is therefore never simply “How can we make this more like a game?”
The more useful questions are what we want people to do, what currently stands between them and that behavior, what kind of experience we want to create along the way, and what game design has already taught us that might help.
That is where gamification begins.