This selective rejection highlights a crucial insight that many designers overlook. When technical skills and trust are not the issues, what accounts for the failure to engage users? Why do intelligent and willing users deliberately avoid game mechanics that are successful for others?

The problem isn’t poor execution or user acquisition; rather, it often stems from creating the wrong type of game entirely.

The Gamification Doesn’t Match Your Users

The Simple Problem: You’ve chosen competitive mechanics for users who dislike competition, or collection systems for those who find collecting tedious.

The Deep Problem: You’re asking people to invest cognitive energy into game mechanics when their daily life or the task at hand is already overwhelming.

Most gamification advice treats player motivation as a one-size-fits-all solution: “Add leaderboards for engagement!” or “Create achievement systems for progression!” However, just as people have different tastes in music or food, they also have varying relationships with play. While some users are energized by seeing their name on a leaderboard, others may find competition (and even bands like Mumford and Sons) stressful or irrelevant, causing them to disengage completely.

Yu-Kai Chou’s Octalysis Framework categorizes eight core drives that motivate people: epic meaning, accomplishment, creativity, ownership, social influence, scarcity, unpredictability, and loss avoidance. A user primarily driven by creativity will find a points-based system boring, while someone motivated by social connection may be indifferent to personal achievements.

Interestingly, even if you select the right motivational framework, you can still create an ineffective game by misjudging your users’ relationship with complexity.

Your Rewards Are Shallow and Short-Lived

**The Simple Problem:** Surface-level rewards quickly lose their appeal after a short period.

**The Deep Problem:** You’re focusing on manipulating user behavior rather than addressing the actual problem they’re trying to solve.

Many designers tend to rely on easy gamification strategies, such as offering points for actions, badges for reaching milestones, and leaderboards for comparison. While these tactics can be engaging at first due to their novelty, that excitement fades quickly. Accumulating your 8,000th point isn’t thrilling, and earning your fifteenth badge can feel repetitive.

However, the underlying issue is more profound than just reward fatigue or mismatched themes. These superficial mechanics are designed to influence user behavior rather than enhance the core activity itself. Essentially, you are incentivizing people to engage in tasks they do not find intrinsically interesting.

Understanding User Motivation with the Hexad Framework

Recognizing user motivation over time is crucial. Andrej Marczewski’s Hexad framework serves as a valuable tool for comprehending what drives users as they navigate through your app. However, it’s important to note that it’s not a personality test. Instead, think of it as a guide that helps structure users’ experiences through various motivational phases as they engage more deeply with your product.

The solution isn’t about more complex reward systems. Instead, it focuses on identifying what makes your core activity engaging and amplifying those elements through game design that can evolve with users over time.