The Effects of Framing in Gamification. a Study of Failure

Description

The author shows that – contradicting the findings of Lieberoth (2015) – simply framing an activity as a game does not increase intrinsic motivation of the participants in a difficult puzzle task. Moreover, for participants who failed at the puzzle, it does not make any differencein terms of intrinsic motivation whether it was framed as a task, a meaningful task, a game or a test of cognitive abilities. However, perceived value of the activity and satisfaction of the need for autonomy were identified as significant predictors for completing additionalrounds of the task. This lends support for the importance of the voluntariness and meaningfulness of the task to keep people engaged in gamification.

Florian Brühlmann is PhD student at the HCI research group at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is a trained psychologist with special emphasis on Human-Computer Interaction. His research interests include player experience research, questionnaire development andstatistical methods for human-computer interaction research.