Recently my friend David Chandross wrote a great post about how serious games often miss their purpose, becoming more game than serious if you will. That it’s becoming less and less about the learning. That inspired me to reemphasise something I wrote about a while back.
Gamification should help people do things better. That’s it. But somewhere along the way, too many designers decided that the point was to make people play their systems, rather than benefit from them.
It’s easy to spot. You open an app or a training program and you’re immediately pulled into some shiny loop of collecting things, hitting targets, and chasing streaks. The problem is, you’re no longer learning or improving, you’re just playing. The system has become the goal.
If users are optimising for your mechanics instead of their progress, you’ve built something entertaining, not effective.
Gamification isn’t about making things “fun”. It’s about making them work. If you can do that in a way that is fun – awesome!
Adding points, levels, or a bit of story only makes sense if it helps people reach a useful outcome. When the “game” becomes the point, everything loses focus. People end up feeding the system instead of feeding their growth.
This is where a lot of designers fall into what I call the “engagement trap”. They measure success by how many people are clicking, not by what they’re achieving. Engagement is easy. Meaningful progress is hard.
The goal isn’t to make people play your game. The goal is to make them better at their game.
Too many organisations still believe that surface-level fun equals engagement. It’s the same logic that gives us office foosball tables, cereal bars, and “innovation lounges” that no one actually uses.
I wrote about this years ago in The Foosball Fallacy. Adding playfulness or perks doesn’t create purpose. It’s decoration. You can’t expect people to care just because something looks like a game.
Real engagement comes from meeting intrinsic needs: Relatedness, Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose (the RAMP model). If people are only chasing tokens, you’ve lost at least three of those four.
Shallow fun is the design equivalent of empty calories. Feels good for a moment, achieves nothing long term.
Extrinsic rewards can kickstart a system, but if that’s all you rely on, you’re bribing behaviour, not building it.
When people do something only for the reward, you trigger what psychologists call the Overjustification Effect. The external incentive becomes the reason, and the internal motivation dies. Once the points or badges stop, so does the effort.
The best systems treat rewards as feedback, not payment. Recognition of progress, not manipulation to keep clicking.
If your gamified design makes people think, “What do I get for doing this?”, you’ve already lost their genuine interest.
Every system should be built around one question:
“Does this actually help the user achieve what they came here to do?”
That’s the “I” in the R.I.S.E. Framework: Relevance, Integrity, Sympathy, Empathy. If what you’ve designed benefits your KPIs more than your users, then you’ve created a manipulation engine, not a motivational one.
Gamification works best when user success and organisational success are the same thing. Anything else is noise.
Gamification is a means, not an end. Play is a tool, not a target.
When users are “winning” your system but not improving in reality, you’ve built distraction, not design.
Keep it simple:
Because if the user’s playing but not progressing, all you’ve done is waste their time in a slightly more colourful way.
