Scott Nicholson, from the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, looks at current research from the fields of science, education, and psychology to view gamification from a user perspective. He appears to agree with Ferlazzo's finding. Nicholson's position is that gamification should be made meaningful with focus on game elements as opposed to rewards.

“Meaningful gamification puts the needs and goals of the users over the needs of the organization. If users have a positive and meaningful game-based experience that is well-connected to the underlying non-game setting, then the organization will benefit in the long term. Meaningful gamification focuses on introducing elements of play instead of elements of scoring. The same activities will not be meaningful to all users, so designers need to provide a variety of game-based activities to appeal to different users or a customizable gamification system where users can create their own activities. The dependence upon external rewards for motivation should be replaced by connections between the non-game activity and needs or goals in the user's life based upon information, which will allow users to have a positive internalized experience. The resulting user-centered meaningful gamification will result in longer-term and deeper engagement between participants, non-game activities, and supporting organizations.” 

A study by Hanus and Fox shows there is an affect and it is not positive:

"Holistically, the results suggest that some common mechanics used in classroom gamification (i.e., competitive context, badges, and

leaderboards) may harm some educational outcomes.We found that though students from each course started at the same levels of intrinsic

motivation, satisfaction, effort, social comparison, and empowerment, over time students in the gamified course tended to decrease in

motivation, satisfaction, and empowerment relative to the non-gamified course. Although course type alone did not affect students' grades

over time, we found that the effect of course type on students' final exam scores was mediated by their levels of intrinsic motivation.

Students in the gamified class tended to be less intrinsically motivated at Time 3, which caused lower final exam scores" (Hanus & Fox, 2014).

van Roy & Zaman (2015) discuss that Gamification does not always lead to healthy social development:

"by implementing gamification, users are asked to start playing even in contexts where playing is culturally inappropriate...furthermore, competitiveness...stimulates a struggle to be the best, if necessary even by cheating. Moreover, as winning automatically implies someone else's loss, it may promote a more selfishness-centered society and discourage admirable characteristics like, for example, volunteer work or doing good for people" (p.2). 

Emel'yaneno, V.D., Nidolaevich, V., Malinnikov, S.G., Malashenko, I.V., & Vetoshko, L.I. (2016) believe that abstract thinking is taken out of Gamification and is a "consequence of simplifying educational material" (p. 12586):

"Indeed, visual images are easier to grasp than concepts. For example, it is usually more difficult to read because it is not enough to passively perceive palpable images of reality as one must also try to imagine a situation as a whole.

"Our notion about something has more abstract elements than our perception. The ability to understand what this or that notion is can even become an unsolvable problem in learning which is based only on visualization. If we use visualization without any limitations which are determined by the degree of development of students' abstract reasoning, it will damage the future development of abstract reasoning. We should also note that to a person with more or less well developed abstract reasoning and the system of values and ideologies, visualization can hardly be harmful but will let him learn greater amount of information at a greater speed. Another important thing is that excessive use of games makes participants of the educational process get used to performing a set of regular and rapid but usually meaningless actions. These actions do not demand much thinking about and this may also result in worsening the skills of analytical, complex thinking" (p. 12586).