I think yes. If you don't create an obvious avenue for the user to infer his development, he won't be able to do it. You have to confuse the audience to bring in the sense of progress. People learn by being challenged, confused, and by building something. Nobody learns by interfacing with an application that promises it. But besides learning nothing, they can feel good about being engaged, by completing tasks, seeing progress bar moving, seeing number go up. Someone that decides to interface with a learning app instead of learning the damn thing is doomed, will never learn anything at all. Just give them a sense of accomplishment so they can feel good about it. Without gamification what would the platform give them? If don't help them cope with their inertia, there really is nothing you could do. Maybe you are equating gamification with dark patterns? Gamification is not necessarily a bad thing. It is a powerful psychological trick. Can definitely be used for good. Working on performance often feels amazing because we can profile, identify clear bottlenecks and work to reduce them. When you manage to make number go down, you have a clear indication something went right. Maybe you didn't absolutely improve de code, but you made it better in a very specific way under a very specific lens. People like it because of this aspect, and it does feel a little bit like a game. There is a clear requirement and a clear specification. The game aspect makes it very enjoyable. I suppose development against a test suite provides a similar experience. Feels good in a game-ish way. Gamification is more related to the feels good than dark patterns, but obviously, the whole industry will ONLY be interested in exploiting practices. There is no incentive to make the user feel good, at all, without being pervasive. If you care about your user, you should design around the user. Inevitably, you will think a bunch about what feels good. If all you care about is the user learning, developing competence, you will offer no platform at all. The platform will tell them to close it and go do the thing. If you want to motivate them, another story. If you want them to feel accomplished, another story. You're building a feels good, want to feel accomplished want to fool myself into learning app.s gamification is the whole point.