Most people think that Self-Determination Theory and Flow Theory can explain the effects of gamification. We observed significant differences in behavior between students in a gamfied course and a non-gamified course, but Self-Determination Theory and Flow Theory could not explain the differences. This left us with the question:

Why does gamification work?

When I started this project, I was brand new to academic research—especially research on gamification. To catch myself up, I started reading everything I could get my hands on about what gamification was, why it worked, and what people were saying about it.

Once I was in the loop, my job became to write the first draft of the article which would summarize what the most important researchers were saying about gamification, and compare it with our findings.

I was humbled.

As I met one-on-one with my mentor, I constantly received clear and direct feedback on my writing as he would make edits and push me to explain my rationale.

As I was getting my writing in check, I also needed to analyze the data.

There were significant reductions in the number of students who withdrew, failed, and dropped out of the gamified course. The gamified students also tended to get significantly better grades than the non-gamified ones. These were the results that made sense...

What confused us was that we found no significant differences in the results of the Self-Determination and Flow measurements between the gamified and non-gamified groups. This defied what all the experts predicted because we should have seen significantly higher measurements from the gamified group on those two theoretical constructs. We wrote about how these two theories don't seem to explain gamification's effects as well as the experts thought.

* These papers are currently under review for publication