Social marketing aims to affect users’ health-related behaviors through various tools and one of these tools, gamification, has gained an increasing attention in many behavior changing programs. Gamification has been widely used to enhance users’ engagement with their mobile applications. However, there is still some doubts on how exactly gamification can engage users via the mediating role of empowerment which brings a novel thought in the field of user engagement. This research investigates how gamification might engage users (both to the app and the behavior) through empowering them which leads to change a behavior. In the first study which is a qualitative study, nine gamified application have been analyzed by using a methodology inspired from netnography. The main idea behind this study is to find out the gamified mechanics that would empower users through providing gameful experience. The results of the study show that there are internal relationships among gamification mechanics, dynamics, experience, and empowerment, which might lead to engagement and changing behavior consequently. Data from 9 gamified apps in apple store and google play were analyzed and around 200 readable comments from each app were analyzed with NVIVO analytical software in order to pass the coding process. The results show that there are internal relationships among gamification mechanics, dynamics, gamified experience and empowerment that might lead to engagement. Finally, this study provides a number of theoretical and practical implications that can help health-related and business experts to design and have a more effective and detailed gamified program in a way to foster users’ engagement. It represents also the first step for developing an experimental protocol.