Beyond Badges: Rethinking Gamification from a Designer’s POV

Monday morning, 9:22am, East Conference Room

He’s been staring at my shirt from across the table all meeting. I’m not annoyed, but seriously, those dev guys sometimes lack subtlety. At first, I thought I had a stain. But no — he’s squinting. Trying to figure out the design or read the text. As the meeting ends, we lock eyes, he grins, I grin, and I know he’s gonna ask me about it.

As we head back to the dev pit, he walks up next to me, pointing at my tee shirt, and opens his mouth to ask, but I beat him to it.

“It’s a game.” I turn to face him and point at the character in the upper left corner of the grid on my shirt. “Scan this, and you’ll get it.”

He looks confused for a sec, pulls out his phone and, a skeptical frown on his face, scans the cartoon character that only sorta looks like a QR code. It works.

I walk away, but behind me I hear him say, “Hash Off? Is this like... a brunch fight club?”

I laugh and yell back at him, “You dev guys don’t stand a chance if that’s all ya got.”

The Best Motivation Comes From Within

That’s an example of intrinsic motivation in gamification. And yes, that tee design is gamified — at least in the sense of the word that actually works. My friend saw a puzzle on a t-shirt and was motivated to figure it out, not because there was a badge to earn or points to win, but because the question about what it represented needed to be answered.

This is where gamification is at its best — the player isn’t forced to do anything; they choose to act because they want to. My shirt didn’t give him a to-do list or a leaderboard. I handed out no gold stars. The shirt created a question that begged to be answered. A puzzle was presented, and he bit.

That’s not gamification. That’s play.

Yu-kai Chou, a leading gamification theorist, puts it simply: if you remove all goals and rewards, and the person still wants to do the activity, then it’s intrinsically motivating. If not, it’s extrinsic. [1]

Rethinking Gamification Fatigue: When Play Becomes Work

Gamification has taken off over the past decade, and not always in a good way. [2] It’s become the go-to trend in marketing, but that’s not the success story it sounds like it should be.

The gamification trend started with good intentions. People play video games for hours with no tangible reward, just the satisfaction of progress. Marketers asked, “How can we make people want our products like they want to play games?”

The answer? Apply game theory to the customer journey. [3]

So they duplicated some of the components that games had, they added points for every click. Badges for completion. Leaderboards for competition. The classic PBL suite: Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. Suddenly, everything was “gamified.”

But a list of rewards doesn’t make something a game. It makes it a spreadsheet with glitter glue and a panic attack.

The Game Is Not the Product

Take Duolingo. It’s often cited as a gamification success story. And sure, their PBL system keeps users coming back. But let’s be honest, most people on Duolingo aren’t grinding out Spanish lessons just for XP. They have an internal goal. The gamification just keeps that momentum going. [4]

Compare that to McDonald’s Monopoly. At first, it felt like a real game. Collect pieces. Win prizes. Simple. But then people realized the rare pieces were impossibly rare. The game was rigged. [5] It wasn’t a game—it was a baited hook. And once customers realized that? Game over.

Want more proof of that? Check out the fraud claims McDonald's had to deal with as a result of blatantly trying to manipulate their customers. [5]

When people feel like they are being played, the illusion breaks. And with it, so does trust.

UX Designers vs. The Gamification Gimmick

User Experience Design is all about making a user’s journey to their goal as smooth and satisfying as possible. But users are unpredictable. They're human.

Extrinsic rewards (“do this to get that”) might get quick wins. But they burn out fast. Intrinsic motivation (“I want to do this”) is harder to earn but lasts far longer.

That’s why UX designers hate most gamification. It:

• Adds clutter and confusion, increasing cognitive load.

• Manipulates users, eroding trust.

• Fails over time, as users grow numb to artificial mechanics.[6][7][8]

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In short? It makes everything worse while pretending to be fun.

The Rescue: Real Play, Real Choice

Good games don’t need to beg. They invite. That board game on the shelf doesn’t scream for your attention — it simply promises fun if you choose to engage.

Intrinsic motivation is self-sustaining. The reward is the experience. Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is empty calories. The moment it tastes fake, the player leaves.

Which brings us back to that shirt.

The Hash Off: A Tee with a Twist

That shirt interaction wasn’t just a gag. It was part of a project I’m building called The Hash Off.

At first glance, it’s just a graphic tee. But the design is laced with jokes, references, and a QR code that leads to a lightweight, community-driven online game.

In The Hash Off, players align with one of eight groups—each defined by how they use the “#” symbol. From coders to social media stans, everyone has their hash. Players pick a side and compete in silly, low-stakes trivia and puzzle challenges to prove their team reigns supreme.

It’s goofy. It’s low-fi. And it’s completely voluntary.

The Bigger Game I’m Playing

But that project? It’s only part of a bigger game. One I call Create Your Own Business to Survive.

I’m starting from scratch. No connections. No funding. No following. Just ideas, two cups of stubborn, and a half-broken laptop held together with duct tape and game design dreams.

And like any good game, I’m not here to win every round. I’m here to play. Every failure teaches me. Every new project levels me up.

The Hash Off might flop. You know what? That’s okay. I’ve already taken my turn, and am ready to do better on the next one.

And the next turn? Well, look at that…you’re already a part of it. :D

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References

[1] Chou, Yu-kai (2015). "Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards." https://yukaichou.com/gamification-book/

[2] Gartner (2020). "How Gamification Boosts Consumer Engagement." https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/how-gamification-boosts-consumer-engagement

[3] Deterding et al. (2011). "From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining Gamification." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230854710_From_Game_Design_Elements_to_Gamefulness_Defining_Gamification

[4] Xing et al. (2023). "The Effectiveness of Gamified Tools for Foreign Language Learning (FLL): A Systematic Review." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10135444/

[5] CNBC (2020). "How McDonald's Found Out Its Wildly Popular Monopoly Game Was a Fraud." https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/07/how-mcmillions-scam-rigged-the-mcdonalds-monopoly-game.html

[6] Hamari et al. (2014). "Does Gamification Work? A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification." https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6758978

[7] Nielsen Norman Group (2023). "Gamification in the User Experience." https://www.nngroup.com/videos/gamification-user-experience/

[8] Medium (2023). "When and How Is Gamification Harmful?" https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/when-and-how-is-gamification-harmful-8e37c076d4f5