Gamification Fatigue and Continuance Intention in Technology‑Enhanced Learning Platforms: A Post‑Adoption Extension of TAM

Abstract

Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) platforms have become infrastructure in higher education, yet many implementations fail to sustain students’ voluntary engagement over time. Gamification is widely adopted to increase participation through game design elements such as points, badges, leaderboards, and progress feedback. However, a growing body of work suggests that gamification’s benefits are temporally dynamic: early engagement gains may attenuate after an initial novelty window, and some designs may introduce psychological strain that contributes to disengagement and fatigue. Despite these practical concerns, most gamification-acceptance studies remain cross-sectional and focus on initial adoption rather than continuance. This paper reframes gamified TEL acceptance as a post-adoption phenomenon and proposes a continuance-oriented model that extends the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with two constructs that are theoretically central to sustained use: satisfaction and gamification fatigue. Gamification fatigue is conceptualised as a progressive decline in motivational value due to habituation, mechanic-goal misalignment, perceived unfairness, competitive pressure, or interaction overload. To ground the post-adoption framing, we report pilot evidence from a university student survey (N=71) containing TAM beliefs, perceived gamification features, and continuance-oriented intention items. The pilot results indicate strong positive associations among constructs; perceived gamification shows the strongest correlation with intention (r=.795), followed by perceived ease of use (r=.696) and perceived usefulness (r=.679). In multiple regression, perceived gamification and perceived ease of use significantly predict continuance-oriented intention, while perceived usefulness is not significant when controlling for the other predictors. Building on these findings and recent longitudinal evidence on novelty and fatigue dynamics, the paper contributes a post-adoption conceptual model, an operational definition of gamification fatigue, and a longitudinal protocol and measurement instrument for semester-scale evaluation.