Gamification is the process of integrating game design elements and principles into non-game contexts. The goal is to increase user engagement and motivation through the use of game elements such as points, badges, leaderboards, and more. It is a component of system design. Gamifcation has been used to improve organizational productivity, flow, learning, crowdsourcing, knowledge retention, employee recruitment and evaluation, usability, usefulness of systems, physical exercise, tailored interactions and icebreaker activities in dating apps, traffic violations, voter apathy, public attitudes about alternative energy, and more.

Gamification techniques work by leveraging people's desires for socializing, learning, mastery, competition, achievement, status, self-expression, altruism, and closure, or simply their response to framing a situation as a game. Players are engaged using competition and rewards for completing tasks. Rewards can include points, badges, levels, filling a progress bar, and virtual currency. Making the rewards for accomplishing tasks visible to other players (e.g., leaderboards) encourages players to compete. Meaningful choice, onboarding tutorials, increasing challenge, and adding narrative are other ways to make tasks feel more like games.

Game elements are the building blocks of gamification applications. They commonly include points, badges, leaderboards, performance graphs, meaningful stories, avatars, and teammates.

Points are basic elements of a multitude of games and gamified applications. They are typically rewarded for the successful accomplishment of specified activities within the gamified environment and they serve to numerically represent a player's progress. Various kinds of points can be differentiated between, e.g. experience points, redeemable points, or reputation points, as can the different purposes that points serve. One of the most important purposes of points is to provide feedback. Points allow the players' in-game behavior to be measured, and they serve as continuous and immediate feedback and as a reward.

Badges are defined as visual representations of achievements and can be earned and collected within the gamification environment. They confirm the players' achievements, symbolize their merits, and visibly show their accomplishment of levels or goals. Earning a badge can be dependent on a specific number of points or on particular activities within the game. Badges have many functions, serving as goals, if the prerequisites for winning them are known to the player, or as virtual status symbols. In the same way as points, badges also provide feedback, in that they indicate how the players have performed. Badges can influence players' behavior, leading them to select certain routes and challenges in order to earn badges that are associated with them. Additionally, as badges symbolize one's membership in a group of those who own this particular badge, they also can exert social influences on players and co-players.

Leaderboards rank players according to their relative success, measuring them against a certain success criterion. As such, leaderboards can help determine who performs best in a certain activity and are thus competitive indicators of progress that relate the player's own performance to the performance of others. However, the motivational potential of leaderboards is mixed. Werbach and Hunter regard them as effective motivators if there are only a few points left to the next level or position, but as demotivators, if players find themselves at the bottom end of the leaderboard. Competition caused by leaderboards can create social pressure to increase the player's level of engagement and can consequently have a constructive effect on participation and learning. However, these positive effects of competition are more likely if the respective competitors are approximately at the same performance level.

Performance graphs provide information about the players' performance compared to their preceding performance during a game. Thus, in contrast to leaderboards, performance graphs do not compare the player's performance to other players, but instead, evaluate the player's own performance over time. Unlike the social reference standard of leaderboards, performance graphs are based on an individual reference standard. By graphically displaying the player's performance over a fixed period, they focus on improvements. Motivation theory postulates that this fosters mastery orientation, which is particularly beneficial to learning.

Meaningful stories are game design elements that don't relate to the player's performance. The narrative context in which a gamified application can be embedded contextualizes activities and characters in the game and gives them meaning beyond the mere quest for points and achievements. A story can be communicated by a game's title (e.g., Space Invaders) or by complex storylines typical of contemporary role-playing video games (e.g., The Elder Scrolls Series). Narrative contexts can be oriented towards real, non-game contexts or act as analogies of real-world settings. The latter can enrich boring, barely stimulating contexts, and, consequently, inspire and motivate players particularly if the story is in line with their personal interests.