Search for “gamification problems eLearning motivation” and the results are thin. Open almost any article about gamification in eLearning instead and you will find the same promise: add points, badges and a leaderboard, and engagement will soar. Vendors repeat it, conference talks repeat it, and a lot of course creators have quietly stopped questioning it.
The research tells a more complicated story. For more than fifty years, psychologists have documented a pattern that should make every learning designer uncomfortable: rewarding people for something they already enjoy can make them enjoy it less. Gamification, in its most common form, is a reward system. If we ignore what that literature says, we risk building courses that look lively on a dashboard and feel hollow to the people taking them.
This article looks at what the evidence actually shows, why points and badges can backfire, what to do instead, and where gamification genuinely earns its place.
What the research actually says
Let’s start with fairness: gamification is not a failure across the board. Meta-analyses of gamified learning, such as the one by Sailer and Homner (2020), report small-to-moderate positive effects on cognitive, motivational and behavioral outcomes on average. Earlier reviews, including Hamari, Koivisto and Sarsa’s widely cited 2014 paper, reached a more cautious conclusion: gamification can work, but results depend heavily on context and on who the users are.
That phrase, “depends on context,” is where most marketing copy stops reading. Averages hide a wide spread. Some gamified courses help a great deal, some do nothing, and some do harm. The useful question for a course creator is not “does gamification work?” but “under what conditions does it work, and when does it quietly damage the thing I care about?”
To answer that, we need to look at the psychology of motivation itself. For a complementary look at how the impact of game mechanics can be measured, see our article on quantifying the efficacy of gamification on student learning outcomes and motivation.
The overjustification effect
Psychologists distinguish between two broad kinds of motivation. Intrinsic motivation means doing something because the activity itself is interesting or satisfying. Extrinsic motivation means doing it for a separate outcome: a grade, a prize, a badge.
The overjustification effect describes what happens when the second is layered on top of the first. A person who was already motivated by interest receives an external reward for the same activity. Later, they start explaining their own behavior to themselves differently: “I did this for the reward.” When the reward disappears, so does much of the interest.
The classic demonstration comes from Lepper, Greene and Nisbett (1973). Preschool children who liked drawing were split into groups. Some were told in advance they would receive a “Good Player” certificate for drawing; others got no reward, or got an unexpected one. Weeks later, in free play, the children who had expected the reward spent markedly less time drawing on their own than the others. The reward had turned play into work.
The finding has held up well. In a meta-analysis of 128 experiments, Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999) found that tangible rewards significantly undermined intrinsic motivation, especially when they were expected and contingent on doing the task. Verbal, informational praise, by contrast, tended to have a positive effect. A later meta-analysis by Cerasoli, Nicklin and Ford (2014) added a useful nuance: incentives tend to be better predictors of the quantity of performance, while intrinsic motivation is a stronger predictor of its quality.
For learning, quality is usually the point.
Why points and badges are risky in particular
Self-determination theory, the framework behind much of this research, says people need three things to stay motivated over time: autonomy (a sense of choice), competence (a sense of growing mastery) and relatedness (a sense of connection). Rewards undermine motivation when they feel controlling, when they signal “you are doing this because we are steering you,” rather than informative, when they signal “you are getting better at this.”
Most standard gamification elements are controlling by design. A leaderboard says compete or fall behind. A streak says show up every day or lose what you built. A points-per-click scheme says we are measuring your activity. None of this is automatically harmful, but all of it shifts the answer to the learner’s silent question: why am I doing this?
Gamification problems eLearning motivation studies reveal
The most direct evidence comes from a semester-long study by Hanus and Fox (2015). They compared two versions of the same course, one with a gamification layer of badges and a leaderboard and one without. Over the term, students in the gamified course reported lower motivation, satisfaction and sense of empowerment, and they performed worse on the final exam. Students in the non-gamified course did better on all of those measures.
Another study, by Mekler and colleagues (2017), tested points, levels and leaderboards on a simple image-tagging task. The game elements increased how much participants did (more tags) but had no effect on their intrinsic motivation or sense of competence, and no improvement in the quality of the work.
Beyond published studies, anyone who has worked in L&D will recognize these patterns. They are illustrative, not drawn from a single named case:
- The compliance course with a leaderboard. Learners discover that speed is what the leaderboard rewards. They click through slides, guess at quiz answers until they pass, and collect the badge without absorbing the policy. Completion data looks wonderful; behavior on the job doesn’t change.
- Points for forum posts. A discussion board starts awarding points per contribution. Within weeks it fills with “Great point, I agree!” The metric rose, the conversation died.
- The streak that becomes a chore. Daily-streak mechanics keep people logging in, but often to do the minimum that protects the streak. Some learners report anxiety when a streak breaks, and a few abandon the product entirely rather than rebuild it.
- The completion badge. When the badge is the goal, the learner optimizes for earning it. This is a version of Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.
In every case, the gamification system did exactly what it was designed to do. The design simply measured and rewarded the wrong thing.
What to do instead
If points and badges are risky, what should a course creator do? The answer is not to strip all game thinking from your design. It’s to build motivation on foundations that don’t erode.
1. Design for competence, not for scores.
Give learners clear evidence that they are improving: specific feedback, visible skill progression, challenges that scale with their ability. A progress indicator that reflects real mastery supports intrinsic motivation. A points total that reflects clicks does not.
2. Protect autonomy.
Offer meaningful choices: which scenario to tackle first, which examples to explore, how deep to go. Let people opt in to game elements rather than forcing them on everyone. A leaderboard that learners can hide is a very different thing from one they can’t.
3. Make feedback informational, not controlling.
Compare two ways of telling a learner they did well:
| Controlling | Informational |
|---|---|
| “You earned 50 points!” | “You correctly diagnosed three of four root causes. The one you missed involved a common pitfall; here’s why.” |
| “You’re #7 on the leaderboard.” | “Your accuracy on negotiation scenarios has risen 20% since module 2.” |
| “Keep your streak alive!” | “You’ve built a good rhythm. Here’s what to tackle next.” |
4. Favor collaboration over competition.
Team challenges and shared goals build relatedness. Pure ranking tends to motivate the people at the top and discourage everyone else, which is often the majority.
5. Reward the right things, and sparingly.
If you use rewards, tie them to mastery or quality rather than activity. Unexpected recognition after the fact is less likely to be experienced as controlling than a reward announced in advance.
6. Test before you scale.
Don’t judge a gamified design by logins and completion rates alone. Look at the signals that reflect real motivation: voluntary return after the course ends, quality of open-ended responses, performance on delayed tests, and what learners say when asked why they kept going.
The rule of thumb: ask whether a game element tells learners something true about their growth, or merely tells them what you want them to do.
When gamification is appropriate
None of this means points and badges are always wrong. The same research that warns against them also points to the situations where they help.
- The task is genuinely uninteresting. Overjustification requires pre-existing interest to undermine. Where little intrinsic motivation exists, such as mandatory but dull procedural training, external structure can help people get started without costing much. The key is to treat it as scaffolding to get them through, not a long-term engine.
- You’re building a habit. Early on, small rewards and reminders can help learners establish a routine. Plan how to shift toward intrinsic reasons as the habit forms.
- Game elements carry real information. Progress bars tied to actual skill, scenario-based challenges with consequences, and clear levels of mastery work because they support competence, not because they dispense rewards.
- Collaboration is central. Cooperative games, team quests and shared objectives can strengthen connection among learners, particularly in cohort-based or remote programs.
- The audience wants it. Some learners enjoy competition and respond well to it. Giving people the option, rather than the obligation, lets them self-select.
In other words, gamification is a tool with side effects, not a switch for engagement. Used deliberately, it can help. Used by default, it can quietly teach learners that the point of learning is the reward.
The takeaway
The overjustification effect is one of the best-replicated ideas in motivational psychology, and it sits awkwardly beside the optimism of most gamification marketing. That doesn’t make gamification the enemy. It means the burden of proof belongs on the designer: what does this element do to my learners’ reasons for learning?
If the honest answer is “it makes them want the badge more than the skill,” you have a problem that no dashboard will show you. If the answer is “it helps them see their growth and choose their path,” you’re building on solid ground.
Motivation is not something you add to a course. It is something your course either protects or wears away. Design accordingly.
References
- Cerasoli, C. P., Nicklin, J. M., & Ford, M. T. (2014). Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives jointly predict performance: A 40-year meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 140(4).
- Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6).
- Hamari, J., Koivisto, J., & Sarsa, H. (2014). Does gamification work? A literature review of empirical studies on gamification. Proceedings of HICSS 2014.
- Hanus, M. D., & Fox, J. (2015). Assessing the effects of gamification in the classroom: A longitudinal study on intrinsic motivation, social comparison, satisfaction, effort, and academic performance. Computers & Education, 80.
- Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973). Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28(1).
- Mekler, E. D., Brühlmann, F., Tuch, A. N., & Opwis, K. (2017). Towards understanding the effects of individual gamification elements on intrinsic motivation and performance. Computers in Human Behavior, 71.
- Sailer, M., & Homner, L. (2020). The gamification of learning: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 32.
