Investigating Motivation in Gamification

Gamification has drawn increasing attention in the last years. The goal is to motivate people and to increase engagement for tasks. However, the empirical research remains limited, due to the unclear definition of the term gamification and an underdeveloped theory. The research at hand tries to narrow this gap by conducting a laboratory experiment to test the effects of gamification on the performance of subjects in a rather boring task. Beyond this, we tried to capture the motivation of the subjects during and after the experiment using different questionnaires. This was done to provide deeper insights into the interim step between gamification and performance. We could identify some significant motivational effects, though the performance was not increased. The results indicate that different gamification elements do not cumulate their influence. Experiments and the measurement of motivational effects of gamification elements provide an interesting research opportunity for future research.