Gamification Box: Automated Personalized Rewards for Improved Task Experience

Abstract

We introduce a gamified rewarding system, called "Gamification Box", and conduct a user study to examine its effects on task experience and performance. Gamification Box provides an interface for automated rewards that are intrinsically enjoyable activities, such as watching short video clips. In a controlled user experiment, 118 participants completed a short-term memory task involving meaningless syllables under either a gamified reward condition or a non-rewarded control condition. Participants in the gamified condition reported significantly greater perceived task enjoyment than those in the control group. Importantly, this increase in perceived enjoyment did not come at the cost of performance: no significant differences were observed in free recall or recognition accuracy between conditions. These findings suggest that while gamified rewards may not directly enhance immediate performance, they function as a motivational regulator, thereby improving task enjoyment. The primary benefit of such systems may therefore lie in supporting sustained effort over time, where cumulative performance gains are more likely to emerge.