Gamification in e-learning involves incorporating game-like elements and principles into educational contexts to engage students and enhance learning outcomes. This practice often includes elements such as points, badges, leaderboards, and challenges. By examining gamification through the lenses of didactic/mimetic, authentic/synthetic, and transformative/reflexive pedagogy, we can better understand its impact on learning.

Gamification of education is a strategy for increasing engagement by incorporating game elements into an educational environment (Dichev and Dicheva 2017). The goal is to generate levels of involvement equal to what games can usually produce (Fardo 2014). The main goals of gamification are to enhance certain abilities, introduce objectives that give learning a purpose, engage students, optimize learning, support behavior change, and socialize (Knutas et al. 2014; Krause et al. 2015; Dichev and Dicheva 2017; Borges et al. 2013).

Stimulated by the effects that game elements can produce, many researchers have looked into the influence of gamification in an educational context, getting favorable results, such as the increase of engagement, user retention, knowledge, and cooperation (Hakulinen and Auvinen 2014; Tvarozek and Brza 2014). Despite that, some studies have shown uncertain or prejudicial results from gamification (Christy and Fox 2014). They found that ranking affects women in various ways and may guide to unexpected opposite impact. Hanus and Fox (2015) informed that, in addition to not increase the results, gamification decreases pleasure and motivation. Haaranen et al. (2014) noticed that some users had adverse emotions about the badges.

The mix of controversial results related to the effects of gamification in learning environments yield doubts concerning the advantages of its utilization in an educational setting. Moreover, research about the effects of gamification elements on students’ learning, participation, and other effects, is a broad goal. The objective should be delimited to what elements of games are efficient for a particular type of student, involved in a given activity (Dichev and Dicheva 2017). Different layouts of elements of games, used to add gamification to diverse activities, produces different effects, hampering the process of determining which elements or collection of these elements are efficient to promote the engagement and learning for a group or type of user, doing a specific action (Dichev and Dicheva 2017). The motivation (Pedro 2016; Hakulinen and Auvinen 2014; Mekler et al. 2017), player profile (Barata et al. 2014; O’Donovan et al. 2013) and personality (Codish and Ravid 2014; Jia et al. 2016) are the characteristics and preferences that have been most investigated in gamified learning environments.