Gamification has been widely applied in the communication process of virtual corporate social responsibility (VCSR) co-creation, which has received great attention from scholars. Thought it is generally believed in previous studies that game elements in VCSR communication positively affect consumers’ participation intention, some scholars insist that gamification reduce perceived sincerity for VCSR co-creation in the part of consumers, and the willingness for participation too. To address such contradiction, this study, based on social cognition theory and experimental methods, explores the boundary conditions and mechanism of gamification affecting consumers’ participation intention in VCSR communication. The results show that game elements will increase participation intention by reducing internet cognitive fatigue in co-creation events with low perceived emergency, and by decreasing perceived sincerity in events with high perceived emergency. Hence, a more comprehensive framework for gamification is proposed in this study.