A badge appears after you hold a position. A progress bar edges toward its target. A short message says you only need to hold on a little longer. None of it changes the volatility, the liquidity, or the fair value of the instrument. All of it can change how the decision feels.
That is what gamification does: it borrows elements from games — achievements, challenges, progress, encouragement — and places them inside activities that are not games. On a financial platform, those elements can make learning more engaging. Placed next to a risky decision, they can also introduce a second goal that has nothing to do with your trading plan.
Philipp Chapkovski, Mariana Khapko, and Marius Zoican studied this in Gamified Risk-Taking, published in 2025 in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance. They ran a randomised online experiment with 605 participants across four countries. Roughly two-thirds reported experience trading on their own account.
Participants traded a virtual asset on an experimental platform. Some saw a plain version. Others saw gamified elements — achievement badges and encouragement messages designed to push them toward holding a volatile asset.
The design turned out to be more than decoration. The digital nudges increased risk-taking, and they did so most clearly when the traded asset was highly volatile.
When the interface adds a second goal
Traders usually enter the market with a financial goal: execute the setup, manage the risk, and exit when the thesis no longer holds. Gamification can quietly add a second goal — finish the challenge, keep the streak, earn the badge, follow the prompt.
That second goal never has to arrive as an explicit instruction to take more risk. A line like “hold a little longer” reads as light and friendly. Behaviourally, it turns holding into an accomplishment — and exiting starts to feel like abandoning progress, even when exiting is exactly what the original plan called for.
The issue is not simply that users enjoy the app more. Engagement and risk-taking are different things. An interface that makes education feel light can genuinely help people learn. An interface that hands out psychological rewards for maintaining exposure is shaping financial decisions.
The useful question is not “is this app enjoyable to use?” It is “what behaviour is this design rewarding?”
Volatility amplifies the effect
The experiment found the influence of gamification to be larger under high volatility. That is directly relevant to forex, crypto, commodities, and derivatives, which can move quickly and are typically traded through notification-rich digital interfaces.
When prices drift slowly, holding a position a little longer may not feel dramatically different. In volatile conditions, a short amount of extra time can change the risk quickly. The message is identical; the environment is not.
This is why design cannot be judged apart from the character of the instrument. A badge that rewards finishing an education module is not the same as a badge that appears because a user kept a risky position open. The visual may be identical, but the reinforced behaviour and its consequences are not.
The research does not claim that every badge leads to a poor decision. What the randomised design allows is a comparison between participants facing similar conditions with and without a gamified nudge. The gap between them indicates that the interface is part of the risk environment.
Experience and literacy offer protection, not immunity
The effect was strongest among less experienced participants with lower financial literacy. In the study’s estimates, a one-standard-deviation increase in financial literacy reduced the gamification effect by 56 percent.
That figure does not mean working through one course removes 56 percent of any given trader’s risk. A standard deviation is a statistical measure within the research sample, not a personal target you can apply directly. The simpler message is that understanding risk helps you recognise consequences that an appealing design keeps out of view.
Experience helps too, because experienced traders are more practised at separating market information from interface signals. But experience is not a reason to dismiss the influence of design. A nudge works precisely because it does not feel like a major decision. It arrives while your attention is already divided between price, position, time, and emotion.
Separate market signals from platform signals
Before acting on a prompt, badge, countdown, or progress bar, a quick check helps:
- Did the market information change, or did only the platform display change?
- Does this message help me understand risk, or does it push me to stay active?
- If the badges and progress bars were removed, would I still make the same decision?
- Does my exit plan still hold without additional conditions from the interface?
None of this requires rejecting the technology. Platforms can use design for genuinely useful things: explaining margin, showing potential losses, flagging concentrated exposure, or asking for confirmation when position size changes sharply. Gamification is not inherently harmful; what matters is the behaviour it reinforces.
Responsible design should make risk more visible. When an interface celebrates activity while hiding consequences, the user receives an unbalanced nudge. When design leaves room to pause, evaluate, and understand the losing scenario, technology can make decisions more measured.
Trading is not a game of clearing levels
The market does not know which badges you have earned. Prices do not move to protect a streak. Volatility does not fall because an app congratulated you. All of it shapes the user experience — and through that experience, possibly the decision.
For Sahabat Trader, the lesson is not that an interface should feel rigid or intimidating. A clear and engaging experience still matters. But design should reinforce a healthy process: understanding exposure, respecting risk limits, recording the reason for entry, and accepting the exit when the thesis stops working.
Before holding a position because of a digital nudge, ask one final question: am I following a market signal, executing my plan, or just trying to finish a game the interface built for me?
References
Chapkovski, P., Khapko, M., & Zoican, M. (2025). Gamified risk-taking. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, 46, 101049. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101049
This article is educational and is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or trade any particular financial instrument.
