A theoretical perspective on the inner workings of gamification in the workplace

Typically, gamification intends to afford gameful experiences in non-game contexts with the goal of promoting desired behaviour. There are however many gamified designs that fail to achieve these goals and there is a lack of theory that can help to explain why some gamified designs are effective while others are not. Within this paper a theoretical perspective is proposed towards explaining the inner workings of gamification in the workplace. Specifically the theoretical model aims to explain how gamification design elements concurrently affect motivation towards desired behaviour and the experience of gamefulness. We draw on expectancy theory to explain how gamification design elements influence motivation and propose to measure the potential for a gameful experience through the effect a design has on psychological, affective and consciousness altering states.