New Trends in Gamification

Twelve years ago, the live question for any leadership team I sat with was whether to adopt gamification at all. Today the question has shifted: which Core Drives is your deployment actually pulling on, and is the underlying experience getting better, or are you sticking points on top of work that nobody wants to do? This post began in 2014 as a guest essay by Jesse Jacobsen of TechnologyAdvice, surveying three then-new trends. I am rewriting it now, in 2026, because the field has moved enough that almost every example needs to be replaced. The underlying lesson, however, has held.

If you want the framework behind every trend below: Yu-kai’s Octalysis Framework maps any experience to the eight Core Drives of human motivation. It is the lens used in each section of this post.

⚡ Speed Run Notes

• Enterprise gamification at real scale is no longer a thought experiment. Caixa Econômica Federal ran an Octalysis-based program across 83,000 employees and watched recurring income climb from 8.6 billion BRL to 17.3 billion BRL.
• Hiring by design competition has matured. Octalysis Group selects across continents using month-long submissions that test for self-management and original thinking, not credentials.
• Wearables are tools dressed up in motivator marketing. Apple Watch, Whoop, and Oura retain the already-active and lose sedentary buyers; Ring Fit, Pokémon GO, and Peloton retain both because they change how the activity feels in the moment.
• AI-native gamification is the genuine 2026 frontier. Generative content as a Core Drive 7 variable-reward engine is real; AI-amplified Black Hat manipulation is the matching risk.
• Loyalty programs are quietly becoming Octalysis-aware. Starbucks, McDonald’s Monopoly, hotel and airline tiers — collection sets and prize pacing are being designed deliberately, not stamped.
• The failure pattern has not changed: companies still add points before they fix whether the underlying experience is tolerable.

Table of Contents

About Yu-kai Chou

Yu-kai Chou is a Human-Systems Architect and Behavioral Designer whose work has impacted over 1.5 billion users worldwide through engagements with LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast. He created the Octalysis Framework, the behavioral design system now taught and applied across products, schools, and governments.

He has taught and lectured at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO. His book Actionable Gamification is one of the most-cited works in the field.

His research has been referenced by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and 3,700+ more. Books by Chou are here.

This particular post matters to me because every one of the trend categories below is one I have actually shipped against, not just observed. Trend 1’s Caixa Econômica Federal case is work my colleagues at Octalysis Group led directly. The hiring model in Trend 2 is how I have hired most of my own team for the past decade. My wearables critique in Trend 3 is something I revisit every year as the category cycles through new hardware, and the AI-native and loyalty trends in 4 and 5 are the active design questions on my desk in 2026. What you are reading is a working design memo, not a survey.

Verify: Wikipedia · Google Scholar · Wikidata · LinkedIn

How Octalysis Core Drives Work

I built the Octalysis Framework around eight Core Drives, the eight motivational engines that explain why people do what they do. When I write “Core Drive 2 (CD2)” I am pointing at Development & Accomplishment, the drive behind progress bars and skill mastery. When I write “Core Drive 7 (CD7)” I am pointing at Unpredictability & Curiosity, the drive behind variable rewards and surprise. Throughout this post I abbreviate Core Drives as CD1 through CD8, but I spell out the name on first mention in each section so nothing has to be memorized to follow along. Each trend below uses different Core Drives in different combinations, and that is where most of the design judgment lives.

The Octalysis Framework: eight Core Drives with the Game Techniques that activate each one.

Trend 1: Enterprise Gamification at Real Scale

Most case studies I see in employee gamification top out at a few hundred users on a single team. Caixa Econômica Federal, Brazil’s second-largest public bank, went the other direction. Working with my colleague Ricardo Lopez Costa and the Octalysis Group team, the bank deployed an Octalysis-based program called Funny Fire across 83,000 employees in 4,500 locations. The numbers since are the clearest published case I have on what enterprise gamification looks like when it is not a points-and-leaderboards layer.

Recurring income went from 8.6 billion BRL in 2017 (baseline) to 11.5 billion in 2018 (+33.7% in Year One), 14.7 billion in 2019 (+70.9% by Year Two), and 17.3 billion in 2021 (+101%, through the worst of COVID). Voluntary adoption inside the workforce moved from the initial 10% pilot to 92% after the social-proof cascade hit. Roughly 1.5 million collectible cards were distributed and around 150,000 prizes redeemed. Seventy-plus internal systems were integrated into the program.

I keep coming back to one thing in our internal review meetings: if games can get kids to voluntarily do hours of secret grunt work, then when we understand why that is, we can get anyone to do anything. That is why this case matters. Operationally, the actual work of being a teller or a back-office processor did not get more interesting. What changed is that the design pulled real motivational levers instead of synthetic ones.

The mission framing pulled on Core Drive 1 (CD1): Epic Meaning & Calling. The team named the corporate revenue target “9 Bilhões Junto” (“9 Billion, Together”), and made it the public banner everyone rallied around. That naming did something subtle. It created accountability. If the company hits 9 billion, the project gets credit. If not, the project clearly failed. That is stake, not slogan.

The collectible cards layered Core Drive 4 (CD4): Ownership & Possession over Core Drive 2 (CD2): Development & Accomplishment. Each department had its own quest cards tied to local KPIs, and finishing a set meant something. Not just a badge in a database, but a physical item with pacing tension. “I have three of four; I urgently want the fourth.” That ownership generates Core Drive 6 (CD6): Scarcity & Impatience naturally, instead of being faked through countdown timers.

Most photographed of all was the social-proof cascade, which ran on Core Drive 5 (CD5): Social Influence & Relatedness. The pilot started with 10% of branches volunteering. As they posted internal updates, traded cards, and surfaced wins on the company’s “Mural” feed, the rest watched. By the third quarter of the rollout, voluntary adoption had crossed 80%. Nobody mandated participation, and nobody had to.

A handful of cards were random drops, which is Core Drive 7 (CD7): Unpredictability & Curiosity in its cleanest enterprise form. People who did not know what they would open kept opening. The Black Hat counterpart, Core Drive 8 (CD8): Loss & Avoidance, also showed up. Once someone had a near-complete set, they did not want their first three cards to go to waste, and the program rewarded that pull instead of fighting it.

What I tell skeptical executives at this point is that the only consequence of doing employee gamification this carefully is that employees might actually be enjoying their jobs. So if you can bear that as a consequence and you want the hundreds of millions of dollars more in profits, then yes, this is for you. The supporting interlink for the progress mechanics is on Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment, and the social-proof cascade is unpacked on Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness.

Trend 2: Hiring by Design Competition

The 2014 version of this section made the case that gamified assessments could replace the resume. That part still reads. What it could not say in 2014 was what such a system actually looks like when it has been running for a decade across continents.

At Octalysis Group, hiring runs on a month-long design competition. Candidates pick from real client briefs we have already shipped or open puzzles we want fresh eyes on. They produce a 30-to-40 page Octalysis analysis and proposal: diagnosis of the existing experience, identification of which Core Drives are missing or overused, specific Game Techniques and Strategy Dashboards we would recommend.

Why the length? Because a clever five-minute test can be passed by chance. A 30-page analysis cannot. By the time someone submits, you have watched them think.

The process is heavy by design. It is hard to decide if you want to work with a person for two to five years or more, just based on two interviews and a piece of paper, which is the resume. It is good to see they actually can do the work. You want to see how they interpret a brief, where they reach for first principles versus templates, whether their writing has anything to it.

The competition pulls on Core Drive 3 (CD3): Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback. There is no script. There is a real client problem with no canonical right answer, and the candidate has to choose what to study, what to ignore, and what to recommend. People who light up at that question are the people who do well in our work. People who freeze, or who pattern-match without judgment, are people we would struggle to work with anyway. The structure of the deliverable is also a Core Drive 2 (CD2): Development & Accomplishment signal, because completing it requires sustained skill-building under public stakes, often on a framework the candidate did not previously know.

It also reveals something traditional interviews cannot: self-management under remote conditions. Octalysis Group is distributed across Bulgaria, England, Norway, Hawaii, the United States, and Brazil. Working from home is comfortable and free. It also requires a lot of drive. We have seen people who in their first three months are excited and producing strongly. Then five or eight months in, because they are always next to their bed and next to their family, the emotional triggers around them are subconsciously reminding them to rest, to chill out. The four-week competition does not catch every case, but it beats a forty-minute call at predicting which kind of remote worker someone will be.

I will be specific about what the rubric scores. Octalysis fluency: do they correctly identify which Core Drives a real product is using, and which it is missing? Strategy clarity: are the Game Technique recommendations connected to specific behaviors, or are they decorating? Writing quality: can they communicate a model to a client who does not know the framework? Self-direction: did they choose interesting problems to investigate, or did they coast on what was given?

The trade-off is real. Fewer applicants will commit to a four-week design competition than will send a resume. That is the point. The selection is not the test; the selection is the willingness to take the test.

Trend 3: Wearables and the Tools-vs-Motivators Distinction

The 2014 version pointed at Procter & Gamble’s interactive electric toothbrush and the Nike+ FuelBand. The toothbrush is a footnote, and the FuelBand was discontinued years ago. That category, connected hardware that quantifies behavior, is now the Apple Watch, the Whoop strap, the Oura Ring, and a hundred app-and-strap combinations behind them.

So has the gamification of the body finally worked? Mostly no, and the failure mode is the same one I keep flagging in client reviews. A tool assists someone who is already trying. A motivator produces trying from someone who was not. Wearables are tools dressed up in motivator marketing.

Pull up a stack of Apple Watch, Whoop, and Oura retention curves and you see the same pattern. People who already exercise keep them on for years. Sedentary buyers, exactly the group the marketing implicitly targeted, churn within weeks. The data is gorgeous. The dashboard is a museum, and museums do not change behavior.

A motivator changes how the activity feels in the moment of doing it. A tool only changes how you feel about the activity after it is done. Once you put the test in those terms, it is obvious why Apple Watch rings work for the already-active. They are a clean Core Drive 2 (CD2): Development & Accomplishment loop layered onto an activity the user is already doing, with a clean Core Drive 4 (CD4): Ownership & Possession overlay (the streak, the year-long ring chart). Both are powerful, and both are reactive. They reward what already happens.

What is missing is Core Drive 3 (CD3): Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback (the dashboard looks the same every day, with no decisions to make), and Core Drive 7 (CD7): Unpredictability & Curiosity (no surprise, no story, no twist). For someone who has already chosen exercise, the missing drives do not matter. For someone who has not, those are the only drives that would have produced trying in the first place.

The clearest counter-examples are products that turn the activity itself into a game. Ring Fit Adventure on the Switch made squats and planks part of a fantasy RPG with bosses, dialogue, and stage progression. People who had never voluntarily exercised began exercising to advance the story. Pokémon GO got non-walkers to walk, not by paying them in points but by location-locking the Pokémon they wanted to catch. The walk is the game. Peloton built parasocial relationships with specific instructors so that returning to the bike is also returning to a person you care about; that is Core Drive 5 (CD5): Social Influence & Relatedness carrying more weight than the bike data does.

Here is the diagnostic I give product teams in this category. If your entire user base consisted only of people who had never voluntarily done the activity before, would your design still work? If the answer is no, you have built a tool. If the answer is yes, you have built a motivator.

The reason this distinction is worth holding onto in 2026 is that AI is going to be paired with wearables fast. Generative coaching, dynamic plans, voice-controlled feedback. Without the tools-versus-motivators check, AI just makes the dashboard talk back. A talking dashboard is still a dashboard. The wearable category will only break out when designers stop describing already-active users as “users we delight” and start designing for the people who have not started yet. The hub for this kind of CD3 question is on Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback.

Trend 4: AI-Native Gamification

In 2014 nobody could have written this section. Generative AI as a Core Drive 7 (CD7): Unpredictability & Curiosity engine is the trend that did not exist back then and is the most important one I am tracking now.

The clearest mechanic in 2026 is AI-generated content as the variable reward itself. Bloom (which I advise) builds full Unity games from configuration; play-throughs vary because the engine assembles experiences from a curated catalog rather than re-rolling code. Inworld and similar tools let NPCs hold real conversations, so each playthrough surfaces dialogue you have never seen. Skyrim mods now ship with AI dungeon-masters that generate quest content on the fly. Every one of those is a CD7 amplifier; the point is not that the AI is smart, it is that the player cannot fully predict what is coming.

Outside games, the same engine applies. Personalized onboarding flows that adapt to where the user got stuck. Coaching apps that branch the next exercise based on what someone said in voice journaling. Reading apps that turn your highlights into a quiz the next morning. Each one uses generative output as a delivery mechanism for variable reward inside an existing routine.

The risk is symmetrical. AI-amplified Black Hat manipulation is cheaper to scale now than at any point in my career. A casino used to need a creative director and a behavioral psychologist to design a near-miss schedule. Now it needs a prompt and a cheap model. Slot-machine UX, push notifications, dark-pattern checkouts: all of those are Core Drive 8 (CD8): Loss & Avoidance and Core Drive 6 (CD6): Scarcity & Impatience machines that benefit from generative variability the same way games do. Knowing the difference between White Hat and Black Hat application of these mechanics is going to matter more in the next five years than it has in the previous twenty.

White Hat (top: CD1, CD2, CD3) vs Black Hat (bottom: CD6, CD7, CD8). Same Core Drives, opposite long-term effects on the user.

Here is how I check whether an AI-native experience is using CD7 honestly: ask whether the user leaves better off when the surprise is gone. The Bloom team running through a CONFIG-not-CODE prototype walks away with a working game. A Whoop user who finally gets a “good readiness” score after three weeks of poor scores walks away validated and asleep at last. A slot player who hits a near-miss walks away with their bank account smaller and their dopamine flatter. The CD7 engineering does not decide whether the product is White Hat or Black Hat. What the user has at the end decides that. The deeper hub for the variable-reward drive is on Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity.

Trend 5: Loyalty Programs Becoming Octalysis-Aware

Loyalty programs are the trend nobody calls a trend, because the public-facing change is small. Underneath, the design language has shifted.

The Starbucks Rewards rebuild is the textbook example. Star collection works on Core Drive 2 (CD2): Development & Accomplishment and Core Drive 4 (CD4): Ownership & Possession at the same time. Members can see their Star count rising while a specific reward is also visible at a specific star threshold a few days away. That pacing tension is Core Drive 6 (CD6): Scarcity & Impatience layered over CD4, and it has been tuned deliberately, not stamped.

McDonald’s Monopoly, decades old, has gone digital while keeping the original mechanic. Annual collection sets, a small lottery, and the same near-miss pacing that has carried the program since the 1990s. The thing that makes it endure is that it is a clean CD4 + CD6 + Core Drive 7 (CD7): Unpredictability & Curiosity stack: own the set, race the deadline, get surprised by what you peel.

Sephora and several airline and hotel programs have moved from raw-points systems toward tiered status with surprise drops, exclusive previews, and member-only events. Tier status is CD4 (ownership of identity); surprise drops are CD7 (variable reward); member-only events are Core Drive 5 (CD5): Social Influence & Relatedness and Core Drive 1 (CD1): Epic Meaning & Calling when they are done well. Programs that used to be a points wallet are turning into a multi-Core-Drive design.

The single best test for a loyalty program in 2026: how much of its mechanics work without points at all? If you took the points away and the experience would still be interesting, the design has matured. If you took the points away and there is nothing left, you have built a discount in disguise. The benchmark data behind the redesigns that have moved the needle is on 90+ Gamification Stats, Examples & Cases with ROI.

What Hasn’t Changed: The Failure Pattern

For all that has shifted, the failure mode I see most often has not changed in over two decades. Companies still add points, badges, and leaderboards before they fix whether the underlying experience is tolerable. The right-brain foundation has to come first. Otherwise any gamification layer just makes things worse, not better.

Here is the operational version of that observation: most people don’t feel like upper management is sincere. They’re just like, they’re trying to squeeze more value out of me. When the gamification reads as another squeeze, the layer fails on contact, no matter how clever the mechanic looks in a deck. The Caixa case worked because the program was authored by people who were obviously inside the workforce, not optimizing at it.

The other principle that endures is the separation between coaching and disciplinary mechanics. You really want to separate the disciplinary stuff away from the coaching. The reason is psychological. A coaching loop demands trust. The moment a feedback signal could also be evidence that gets you fired, the loop stops being safe to use, and the whole design quietly stops working, even if nobody has stopped logging in. If your loyalty, productivity, learning, or wearable design feels different from being graded, it is working. If it feels the same, you have built compliance theater.

That is the line I would hand to any team starting a gamification design in 2026. The 3 Types of Motivation post on this site goes deeper into the underlying psychology, and it is the next read I would recommend.

Looking Back: The 2014 TechnologyAdvice Conversation

In 2014 the original version of this post anchored on a recorded conversation between Clark Buckner of TechnologyAdvice and me. We covered why companies were starting to take gamification seriously, what employee engagement deployments looked like at the time, and what I was watching in the recruitment and IoT spaces. The conversation is worth keeping as a historical capsule. Some predictions held up; many of the example products did not. I am leaving the audio embed below for anyone who wants to hear what the conversation sounded like before any of the 2026 examples in this post existed.

This post originally ran in 2014 with a guest essay by Jesse Jacobsen of TechnologyAdvice. The 2026 rewrite is by Yu-kai Chou.

Related Reading

• The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
• Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment
• Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness
• Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity
• White Hat vs Black Hat Gamification
• 90+ Gamification Stats, Examples & Cases with ROI
• 3 Types of Motivation That Explain All Human Behavior
• Books by Yu-kai Chou

Want to design experiences that actually work? Actionable Gamification is the full Octalysis playbook in book form, with eight chapters of Core Drive teardowns and fifty-plus techniques you can apply on Monday morning. Or start with the Octalysis Framework overview.

WOULD YOU LIKE YU-KAI CHOU TO WORK WITH YOUR ORGANIZATION?