ABSTRACT:
Gamification has been widely adopted by businesses and educational institutions to drive desired user behaviors and performance. Despite its significance across industry, healthcare, and organizational contexts, its role in fostering psychological recovery experiences (PRE) remains underexplored. Grounded in gamification frameworks and literature on affordances and PRE, this study investigates the mediating role of PRE between gamification affordances and personal initiative. Additionally, we examine the moderating effect of perceived visual anonymity as a situational affordance in the relationship between gamification affordances and PRE. To test our hypotheses, we collected data from 682 graduate students enrolled in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) course (Study 1: 258; Study 2: 424). Our findings reveal that mastery and control experiences mediate the relationship between collaboration and feedback affordances and personal initiative. Furthermore, perceived visual anonymity negatively moderates the relationship between collaboration affordance and mastery and control experiences, while positively moderating the relationship between feedback affordance and control experience. This study highlights the importance of psychological recovery experiences and perceived visual anonymity in fostering personal initiative within gamified online learning environments.
Key words and phrases: Gamification, gamified learning, online learning, psychological recovery, IT affordances, visual anonymity, personal initiatives, simulation games.