Gamification is often sold through its most visible features: points, competition, challenges, rewards. But this study by Carmen-María Queiro-Ameijeiras, Elies Seguí-Mas, and José Martí-Parreño asks a much more interesting question: what actually makes a student want to use a gamified experience for learning?
To explore this, the authors combined two frameworks that usually approach the problem from different angles. The Technology Acceptance Model asks, in simple terms, whether a tool seems useful and easy to use; Self-Determination Theory focuses on more human factors, such as feeling competent, having autonomy, and relating to others. The study brings both perspectives together in a single model and tests it with 149 students from four Spanish universities who took part in BUGAMAP, a simulator in which teams of four or five managed an insurance company and had to respond to events such as a stock market crash or a natural disaster.
The most interesting result is how much the social dimension matters. Collaborative learning shows the strongest relationship with the perceived usefulness of the experience (β=0.537) and also clearly influences perceived ease of use (β=0.438). Feeling competent, meanwhile, increases perceived usefulness, while having autonomy makes the system seem easier to use.
From there, a fairly logical chain emerges: the more useful and easy to use the experience seems, the more positive students’ attitudes toward it become; and that attitude, in turn, increases their intention to use it again. What is striking is that acceptance of an educational game does not seem to depend so much on making it more spectacular or competitive, but on enabling students to do something with others, feel capable of doing it, and retain a degree of control over what they are doing.
Some caution is needed in interpreting the findings. The study uses a convenience sample, is cross-sectional, and focuses on a very specific business and accounting simulation; moreover, the model itself leaves a substantial part of gamification acceptance unexplained. The authors acknowledge that it should be tested longitudinally, with more representative samples and with additional factors such as institutional support, feedback, or personalisation.
But that is precisely why a less literal reading of the article is useful. Its message is not that there is a statistical recipe for producing successful gamification, but that we may have spent too long looking at the wrong part of the game. A good gamified experience may depend less on the rewards we add than on the human needs we manage to satisfy while people are playing.
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How to Cite: Queiro-Ameijeiras, C.-M., Seguí-Mas, E., & Martí-Parreño, J. (2025). Determinants of gamification acceptance in Higher Education: an empirical model. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 28(1), 127–155. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.28.1.41565
