Gamification, the use of game design elements in non-gaming context, has been introduced to education as a novel teaching and learning approach to engage learners. Current literature has focused on finding ways to afford the playfulness and gamefulness of gamification. This paper has studied college students’ perceptions of pleasure in learning to explore the underlying aspects of enjoyment in their learning experiences. Based upon the playful experiences (PLEX) design framework (Arrasvuori et al., 2011) , we distributed an online survey to 235 college students and used Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to find four underlying aspects of pleasurable learning experiences amongst the participants, instruction (Cronbach’s α = .84), instructors’ teaching styles (Cronbach’s α = .87), learning effectiveness (Cronbach’s α = .71), and collaboration (Cronbach’s α = .71). This scale could be used for gamification designers to identify the key game design elements for their target learners. We have also examined the effects of gender, majors, computer skills, and gaming habits on participants’ preferences for pleasure in learning. Majors resulted in statistically significant differences among the participants’ attitudes towards collaboration (F(6, 212) = 5.84, p < .001, η2 = .14). The implications of the findings are also discussed in the paper.