Introduction  

Everywhere you look, it seems that game features have snuck into everything - from rewards through your go-to coffee shop, to the steps tracker apps on your phone or FitBit.  

‘Gamification’ refers to the application of game design features to ‘non-game’ activities - anything, from educational tools to healthcare software. It has the capacity to transform the way we do anything, adding video game-like features to everyday features. Common aspects of game design include points, streaks, levels and leaderboards. If you’ve ever used a tool like Duolingo, Khan Academy, or any kind of fitness app, you’re already familiar with these tools. Even everyday features you don’t think of, such as likes on Instagram, badges on Reddit or heart rate and sleep tracking on a smartwatch, are considered examples of ‘gamified’ features (Gardiner, 2024).  

Gamification is a common feature of UX design, a way of keeping users engaged on a platform, motivated to continue a task. Take Flora, a study app designed to turn your monotonous daily tasks into something fun and engaging, by rewarding you with a new ‘plant’ to add to your garden with every study session. Additionally, it also includes a social aspect where you can add friends to the app, further boosting motivation to create a ‘competitive’ environment similar to a multi-player video game. These kinds of features are key to helping people feel engaged with anything you could possibly make an app or website for. Those of you who have studied psychology at any point may be familiar with the concept of ‘operant conditioning’. Gamification similarly acts on our impulses, uses rewards to reinforce certain behaviors (Gardiner, 2024).  

Why Gamification? 

Increasingly, using these strategies for these variable services has become essential as a must-have for businesses when it comes to keeping customers engaged. The rollout of rewards programs over the last decade and a half is one of many customary examples of connecting average purchases to a process that feels rewarding, like in games.  

Research also indicates that gamification also has the potential to open up new opportunities for people to reinvent the way we do things even outside of our smartphones or computers. Integrating gamification features into our urban environments is one new development being put into motion (ex: think of the new robot screens you see on top of the recycling cans across campus!) which has indicated the possibility to encourage participation in intensive tasks, and even combat burnout (Sharma et al, 2024). These possible benefits should not be ignored, and it’s vital that we keep our eyes out for these developments around us. 

This all begs the question: how can you integrate a ‘gamified’ experience into your daily life?  

How can you use it? 

One key benefit of gamification is that it motivates you similar to how your favorite video game keeps you hooked for hours on end. Using that same psychology to get yourself to get your daily steps goal done everyday, or to complete an hour’s worth of studying to catch up with your friends’ number of hours studied while holding each other accountable, goes a long way in keeping you productive and healthy. Additional research has come to find that the motivation from gamified platforms and habits can in fact provide greater motivation to keep you participating in healthy activities (Johnson et al, 2016).  

Setting a daily goal for yourself is the first step towards keeping you motivated to accomplish what you wish, for these gamified behaviors to work. Maintaining a ‘streak’, is a common feature of gamified platforms, a helpful way to keep you motivated. One infamous example many of you may remember is Duolingo’s ominous threats about keeping up with your streak. Creating a streak is one of the most ideal ways to keep up the good work (when you’re not being threatened by a certain owl). Setting a goal in mind and creating a timeline to progress towards that goal on a certain basis is the best first step you can take to achieve what you wish.  

  (picture courtesy of 9gag.com) 

It's also important to keep track of your own motivational patterns and connect them to habits you already have. Something simple like rewarding yourself by taking a stroll after you finish your daily hour of studying is one example of incorporating these gamified motivations into your habit. 

It's also worth noting that gamification does have some potential harms too. Those of you who survived CCT109 in recent years may recall the topic of ‘dark patterns’ in media technologies, which keep you returning to these platforms even when they promote certain negative behaviors. One example is its promotion of unhealthy buying habits when it comes to rewards programs, where you may feel encouraged to buy the next latest product to gain points or rewards even when you may not actually need to buy anything. This dark pattern has sometimes been used by gambling platforms – which can be considered especially dangerous (Liberty, 2025). Additionally, gamification often promotes comparison to others, which can create negative counterproductive comparisons that lower your self-esteem rather than boost it (Almeida et al, 2025).  

Keeping in mind your own limits, your lifestyle, and what you can physically and mentally keep up with is important in this regard. Poorly designed gamification won't reap any rewards and may become exhausting quickly (Liberty, 2025). To this end, it’s vital that we set a healthy mindset around certain gamified behaviors. Gamification has most definitely proven to be a vital part of how we think about user experience, and how we can intrinsically motivate ourselves to do better through these game design features. By keeping these habits and behaviors in check, we can effectively strive to improve our motivation and keep ourselves consistently progressing towards our goals.  

References 

Gardiner, B. (2025). How gamification took over the world. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/13/1093375/gamification-behaviorism-npcs-video-games/ 

Sharma, W., Lim, W. M., Kumar, S., Verma, A., & Kumra, R. (2024). Game on! A state-of-the-art overview of doing business with gamification. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 198, 122988. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2023.122988 

Johnson, D., Deterding, S., Kuhn, K. A., Staneva, A., Stoyanov, S., & Hides, L. (2016). Gamification for health and wellbeing: A systematic review of the literature. Internet interventions, 6, 89–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.invent.2016.10.002 

Almeida, C., Kalinowski, M., Uchôa, A., & Feijó, B. (2023). Negative effects of gamification in education software: Systematic mapping and practitioner perceptions. Information and Software Technology, 156, 107142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2022.107142 

Liberty, S. (2025). When and How is Gamification Harmful? Medium.  https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/when-and-how-is-gamification-harmful-8e37c076d4f5