The Effects of Adding Premise and Backstory to Psychological Tasks

Psychological tasks are used for assessment, induction, and treatment in both research and therapeutic contexts. Adding game-elements (e.g., leaderboards, premise, or points) could be beneficial for participant motivation; however, it has been argued that the value of gamification could come at a cost to experience or reliability of the task. We replicated four psychological tasks and added premise and backstory to investigate the effect of gamification on task performance and player experience. Our results show that adding game elements has the potential to negatively influence both player experience and performance. Author Keywords gamification; psychology; performance task; cognitio