Gamification, Presence and Awareness (Part 3/4)
In terms of literature, the best references I found in terms of creating sustained motivation is through meaningful gamification. The term ‘meaningful’ is borrowed from Mezirow’s transformative learning theory (Nicholson, 2015). Transformative learning theory has a close connection with our learners’ context and therefore enhances the compatibility of this pedagogy with our specific environment (Coquillard, 2024). Meaningful gamification focuses on making the gamification meaningful for the learner. As every learner finds meaning in various ways, the aim of meaningful gamification is to help learners connect with their own way of finding meaning (Nicholson, 2015). In terms of motivation theory, this refers to intrinsic motivation. In other words, meaningful gamification focuses on waking up learners’ intrinsic motivation. And intrinsic motivation is basically the most efficient way to generate sustained motivation (Malone & Lepper, 2021).
Meaningful gamification is in its infancy, blending research on gamification, motivation theories, transformative learning, and playful learning (Nicholson, 2015). Nicholson amongst others developed a framework based on the self-determination theory of motivation that could be of great use for our context. The various elements needed to help learners sustain their motivation are the 6 mentioned here.
- Play: Absence of pressure to succeed.
- Exposition: Connect to real-world stories and make our own.
- Choice: Empower learners
- Information: Connect with real-world context
- Engagement: Connect with others in a real-world context.
- Reflection: Connect with one’s own experiences
This framework heavily emphasizes the need to bridge the gamification elements to real world context and develop both inner empowerment and a connection with a community of learners.
This approach seems to be relevant to our goal to help learners able to engage with consistency in meditation. If we look at the self-determination theory (SDT) linked with intrinsic motivation, studies show that gamification has the capacity to foster two out of the three core elements of SDT, namely autonomy and relatedness but not competency (Li, Hew & Du, 2024).
However, it seems that other studies and implementation of meaningful gamification have the potential to have an impact on the three elements (Ling, 2018). Ling’s experiment consists in teaching Singaporean university students learn English language using meaningful gamification. In a flipped classroom setting, students had to engage in a game called ‘The Protégé’ designed to support their English learning. Students move through a virtual world to help an English teacher that is sick and needs both professional and medical help. By helping their teachers in all the various English tasks, they get continuous feedback and endless trials and errors. Other aspects of meaning gamification have also been put in place. The quantitative results show a positive effect on learning from the pretest done, showing the acquisition of competency. The qualitative results expressing students’ perspective on their learning display an experience of empowerment and enthusiasm (autonomy element). Even though the paper explained that relatedness (making meaningful connections with others) has been achieved, I couldn’t see any empirical evidence of it in the results.
While relatedness has been largely unexplored in this theory over the years, some studies have shown that it was the stronger element in SDT to foster intrinsic motivation (Wang, Liu, Kee & Chian, 2019). An example of a three-day blended learning course where meaningful gamification has been implemented in Hong Kong university to learn research and enquiry skills (Tan & Hew, 2016). The quantitative and qualitative data from the results that shows students perspective on meaningful gamification clearly shows a high-level impact of this pedagogy on relatedness. Other research explores this aspect of relatedness considering the social learning theory instead of SDT and shows some great potential in terms of developing intrinsic motivation in learners (Kapp, 2012).
These examples show the direct correlation between meaningful gamification and intrinsic motivation, which is the best prerequisite for sustained motivation to take place (Malone & Lepper, 2021). As explained in the first part of this evaluation, the reason to focus on the field of meaningful gamification for our learners instead of classical gamification is that the latter shows some clear ambiguity in terms of enhancing intrinsic motivation according to SDT (Chapman, Kohler, Rich Trego, 2025). While there are multiple studies that shows that meditation and mindfulness enhance intrinsic motivation using the SDT framework (Donald et al., 2020), further studies need to be done in terms of implementation of meaningful gamification and its impact on sustained motivation in the field of meditation and mindfulness.
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References:
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