Gamification refers to the use of game-design elements or mechanisms in non-game contexts to promote the expected behaviours. Though theoretically promising, empirical studies reported mixed results as to the effectiveness of gamification in educational practices. To understand this issue better, this author selected 44 articles on the topic of educational gamification with the use of a bibliometric analysis software HistCite, followed by a descriptive content analysis on these articles. This author examined three issues, including how effective the educational gamification implementations were in previous empirical studies, how the effectiveness has been measured, and what factors contribute to varied effectiveness results. One significant output of the current study is the redefinition of two terms: game elements refer to “the obvious game-like elements that are frequently used in digital games or gamification, which are concrete nouns”, and gamification mechanisms refer to “the underlying guidelines that make gamification activities engaging, which are abstract nouns that relate to humans’ innate psychological needs”. What’s more, the content analysis helped summarise a framework describing what makes gamification engaging, which contains goal, visualisation, immediate feedback, adaptation, challenge, competition, reward, and fun failure. Limitations and suggestions for future studies have been discussed.

游戏化是指在非游戏环境中使用游戏设计元素或机制来促进预期行为。尽管理论上很有希望，但实证研究报告了关于游戏化在教育实践中的有效性的混合结果。为了更好地理解这个问题，作者使用文献计量分析软件HistCite选择了 44 篇关于教育游戏化主题的文章，然后是对这些文章的描述性内容分析。作者研究了三个问题，包括在之前的实证研究中教育游戏化实施的有效性如何，有效性是如何衡量的，以及哪些因素导致了不同的有效性结果。当前研究的一项重要成果是对两个术语的重新定义：游戏元素是指“在数字游戏或游戏化中经常使用的明显类似游戏的元素，它们是具体名词”，而游戏化机制是指“潜在的指导方针”使游戏化活动具有吸引力，这是与人类与生俱来的心理需求相关的抽象名词”。更重要的是，内容分析有助于总结一个框架，描述什么使游戏化具有吸引力，其中包含目标、可视化、即时反馈、适应、挑战、竞争、奖励和有趣的失败。讨论了未来研究的局限性和建议。