- the scientists grouped the motivational affordances found in the 24 papers into categories
- the categories and frequencies are found in table 2 below
- the most common groups were points, leaderboards, and badges

Results - Motivational Affordances (Hamari et al. 2014)

- 21 of the 24 papers analyzed behavioral outcomes
- when studying behavioral outcomes, the researchers analyzed use intentions and conducted experiments or statistical analyses 
- for studying psychological outcomes, the researchers analyzed motivation, attitude, enjoyment, and more by conducting interviews or questionnaires 

Results - Psychological and Behavioral Outcomes (Hamari et al. 2014)

- the majority of the papers supported the idea that gamification does provide positive effects. However, there were still negative results reported by some articles. 
- table 4 displays the positive effects as announced in the articles 
- some nuances identified by the articles to be aware of: effectiveness of gamification may depend on several aspects including users' motivation and the nature of the gamified system; the gamification effects may only be short-term due to novelty; removing gamification might lead to negative consequences for users that were using it at the time

Results - Reported Results (Hamari et al. 2014)

- most studies were quantitative 
- current gamification research has focused on collecting and examining usage data and directly inferring about user behavior
- table 6 outlines all the types of studies and the frequencies 

Results - Types of Studies (Hamari et al. 2014)

- "the context of gamification" means the activity or service that is being gamified
- table 5 displays all contexts that were studied in the articles 
- the most common one was using gamification in the field of education or learning
     - studies in this context found positive (e.g., improved engagement and enjoyment) and negative (e.g., heightened competition) outcomes
- none of the papers explicitly studied gamification in a marketing context, but the results have implications for businesses and management fields/aspects such as purchase behavior

Results - Contexts of Gamification (Hamari et al. 2014)

- all articles addressed the question of "does gamification work?" but the 24 papers still had varying implementations of motivational affordances, measurements of effectiveness (measuring different types of outcomes), results (negative or positive), and contexts

Chapman University

This is a paper that peer-reviewed research articles on gamification.

Does Gamification Work? — A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on
Gamification

Hamari, J., Koivisto, J., & Sarsa, H. (2014, January). Does gamification work?--a literature review of empirical studies on gamification. In 2014 47th Hawaii international conference on system sciences (pp. 3025-3034). Ieee.

Does Gamification Work? -- A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification

- Gamification has become much more popular in recent years, not only in business models but also in academic research articles. 
- Empirical support on the effectiveness of gamification is much needed in order to dispel the confusion on how positive or negative gamification really is.
- This paper aims to review pre-existing empirical studies on gamification in order to contribute to our understanding of the topic.
- Due to the lack of clarity around which studies truly focus on gamification, the authors of this paper also aim to explore what papers who seemingly focus on gamification are actually studying as motivational affordances and psychological and behavioral outcomes.

Introduction (Hamari et al. 2014)

- search terms: "gamification," "gamif*," "gameful," “motivational affordance” 
- search engines: Scopus, ScienceDirect, EBSCOHost, Web of Science, ACM Digital library, AISel, Google Scholar, Proquest
- table 1 shows all search results, not filtering for academic content
- after the initial search, the researchers narrowed down the results to: 
     - peer-reviewed, 
     - empirical study, 
     - research methods were explained, 
     - motivational affordances were clearly identifiable, 
     - studied gamification, not games
- the scientists then checked through the references of the papers to catch any key papers they may have missed. They found 1 additional relevant paper.
- ended with 24 peer-reviewed academic study articles

Literature review methods (Hamari et al. 2014)

- 1 the motivational affordances (object traits that provide users with the experience of fulfilling their psychological needs, often used to facilitate extrinsic and intrinsic motivation) established as dependent variables by each study
- 2 any psychological outcomes that have been recorded (as independent or dependent variables) in the studies
- 3 the behavioral outcomes that were recorded as dependent variables in each study
- 4 discover which services gamification has been used with
- 5 which methods have been implemented to analyze the effects of the gamifications

Aims of the peer-review (Hamari et al. 2014)

Results (Hamari et al. 2014)

- the reviewed articles suggest that yes, gamification does work, but there are some caveats 
- there are many layers to the effects of gamification that need to be studied 
- the reviewed papers contained two key aspects: 1) the role of the context, 2) user qualities
- for future research on gamification, studies are strongly recommended to include more complex and far-reaching methodologies 

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