The Motivational Power of Levels and High Scores: Examining their impact on User Experience and Persistence within Gamified Tasks

Progression-based game elements such as player progression, which allows one's character to level up and grow in strength or difficulty progression, which provides users with increasingly difficult challenges as they progress in their task are widely used techniques in contemporary gamification design. However, few studies have been carried out to examine in-depth their influence on user experiences and motivation. In this study, two experiments were conducted: the first, a between subject experiment involving 78 participants who were asked to carry out the dot judgment task which had been gamified based on three different progression-based game systems, i.e., Difficult progression, Player progression, and Performance progression in comparison to a non-gamified condition. In the second experiment, conducted with 35 participants, the effect of the three progression-based systems was investigated when used to gamify an inherently desirable and undesirable task. The results showed that for the dot judgment task, participants in the player progression condition reported significantly lower levels of negative affect in comparison to the control condition. For the inherently undesirable task, participants in the player and difficulty progression condition reported higher levels of positive affect and competence, while for the inherently desirable task, participants in the difficulty progression condition spent more time and persisted longer. These findings suggested that designers could leverage difficulty progression systems to amplify the natural appeal of desirable tasks by gradually increasing the complexity or level of challenge, while player progression mechanisms such as awarding titles or roles that reflect progressive achievements from sustained efforts could be leveraged to help improve the emotional experiences for undesirable tasks.