Gamification and user engagement in self-learning software

Abstract

Gamification, or the use of game elements in non-game environments, is a field which has been growing rapidly in the recent years. The main focus of it is to engage users to activities or attach them to organisations, but often only to benefit the organisation, not the individual. User engagement and motivation on the other hand have been studied for example in the fields of management and psychology, where the focus has been to determine how feelings of engagement are formed.

The aim of this thesis is to understand how gamification affects user engagement and motivation as they are perceived by the users themselves. To achieve this a questionnaire study was conducted among the users of a gamified online language learning platform Duolingo. The results seem to indicate that even though in the case of Duolingo there are no organisational benefits to be gained from gamification, it is still implemented in a manner which does not induce feelings of engagement and can reduce intrinsic motivation. The results are reflected on recent gamification research and used to propose ideas on how gamification could be implemented better in systems such as Duolingo.