If Brilliant Copies Duolingo, It Loses What Makes It Brilliant
On the quiet joy of thinking, and the perils of turning learning into a game.
As Duolingo enjoys its gamification success some may wonder: Should Brilliant follow suit? Should it play the same game? To which we offer a gentle but firm reply: no.
Deep learning deserves more than a daily streak, it is simply not a race.
You certainly know it, you sit down, open Brilliant App, and there it is. A subtle challenge, not just to learn something, but to understand it, deeply. No pressure. No timer ticking down. Just pure cognitive satisfaction. And that’s it. That’s the magic. This isn’t “tap the right word for ‘apple’ five times and get a gold coin.” It’s cognitive resistance training. It’s puzzle-powered insight. It’s the slow, deliberate art of thinking through.
Let’s get nerdy for a second. Deep learning means building durable and transferable understanding. In short, it is not about knowing that, but knowing why and how. Apps like Brilliant try to achieve this kind of learning. Their interactive problems don’t just reward right answers, they reward thought process. They are not training your memory, but your mind. In contrast, Duolingo has undeniably mastered the art of engagement. But is this the kind of engagement that fosters deep learning? The fast-paced, point-driven, and reward-saturated gamification aligns well with the memorization, undeniably heavy nature of language learning, where repeated exposure and habit formation are key.
But thinking. Understanding. Insight. How to gamify that?
What the Data Actually Says
We surveyed 125 learners about gamified features. The top choices? Not coins or points. Not leaderboards. And even Avatar skipped the chapter about Storytelling.
This graph highlights the polarity of opinions, positive scores show favourable elements, like ProgressBar or Achievements, and negative scores flag demotivating elements, like Avatars and Virtual Currency. Only younger learners (< 20 years old) showed strong preference for points. And even then, it was ranked behind more meaningful features. Gamification works best when it supports learning, not when it replaces it. And older learners (> 26 years old) prefer Feedback and Concept Maps over Achievements. Find more details here.
The Task Determines the Tool
Let’s start with the crowd favorite: the humble progress bar. Just a quiet, steady arc of completion. And yet, it topped the charts, by a landslide. Learners praised its clarity, simplicity, and motivational pull. Following close behind were achievements and feedback, elements valued not for their novelty, but for their cognitive utility. These mechanisms were described as “essential tools” for organizing study sessions, supporting goal-setting, and reinforcing understanding. The concept map made its unexpected debut in the top ranks not by dazzling with sparkle, but by doing what no badge or leaderboard ever could, showing learners the big picture, where they’re going, how ideas connect, and what’s still out there to explore.
Gamification can be good. We all like a little push, a bit of sparkle, a gentle nudge to keep going. Points, badges, and leaderboards can motivate some learners, especially when used wisely. The danger lies in gamification that substitutes motion for meaning, where learners are rewarded not for insight, but for activity. Brilliant’s superpower is not urgency. It’s understanding. You don’t need to “win” Brilliant. You need to wrestle with ideas. It’s not a game of reflexes, but of reflection. You discover. You learn. Our recent study backs this up: learners consistently rank Progress Bars, Achievements, Feedback, and Concept Maps as their top motivators. And they did so intuitively. Why? Because these support the learning process, not distract from it. This bundle emerges as the most popular and pedagogically meaningful, effectively blending visual motivation, goal-setting, feedback, and structure. This aligns with a deeper psychological distinction: between extrinsic motivators (like points, badges, or social comparison) and intrinsic learning support (like structure, clarity, and feedback). Gamification, when designed to support the latter, doesn’t just retain users. It cultivates thinkers.
The Conclusion
Brilliant please, resist, let’s not turn problem-solving into XP-hoarding. Don’t let the pressure to “retain users” overpower the joy of nurturing thinking. That owl should stay in its own app, where it works well. To make thinking addictive, we need to think about gamification a little bit more. Gamify just enough, use supportive gamification, not addictive gamification.
Here is our Thinkable dream, we want to make thinking itself the reward. We want to remind learners that the trill of discovery is greater than any badge. Learning, it turns out, doesn’t need more glitter. It needs more clarity. More support. More quiet, deliberate design.