A framework for gamification in the metaverse era: How designers envision gameful experience

Gamification uses principles extracted from games to elicit a unique game-like experience for users in various settings, including learning, healthcare, and business. The ‘gameful experience,’ considered by researchers to be the essence of gamification, plays a significant role in positively affecting behavior in organizations and society as a whole. While attempts have been made to conceptualize the idea of gameful experience, those attempts lack empirical insights from gamification designers. Thus, this paper aims to understand gamification from the designer's perspective. Towards this objective, interviews were conducted with experienced gamification designers from different industries and parts of the world. The interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis. Inductive reasoning resulted in eleven themes, which were mapped to four overarching theoretical categories: nudge experience, flow experience, alternate reality experience, and hedonic experience. The evidence indicates that gamification is influenced by positive psychology and the metaverse. The findings provide theoretical insights concerning the construct of gameful experience and practical inputs on the experience to target when implementing gamification.