In recent years gaming has been completely re-framed from a past-time for lame, acne ridden teenagers with no social skills, or Kidults, or Kippers (kids in parents pockets eroding retirement savings) into…….
…a mainstream activity played by millions of people around the world, including (in the US) 40% of women and 29% of people over 50 (theesa.com). No longer is it just Dungeons and Dragons, but Farmville on Facebook, Dance on Wii and Brain Training on the DS. Writers like Jane McGonigal put forward a strong case that games designers really know how to make content that is engaging, that satisfies a range of human needs, (autonomy, mastery and purpose) and that contributes to self-development. Game designers are able to win hearts and minds, and direct the energies and attention of increasingly large masses of people.
Defining traits of a game:
1. A goal – which provides players with a sense of purpose
2. Rules which remove or limit the obvious ways of getting to the goal, thereby fostering strategic thinking and unleashing creativity
3. A feedback system to tell players how close they are to achieving their goal. It serves as a promise that the goal is achievable and maintains motivation if it is rapid and frequent. The rewards signal the player is getting better.
4. Voluntary participation – everyone knowingly accepts the rules and understands they can leave any time they wish. This makes it safe and pleasurable and provides a common ground.
“Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper
Many computer and video games today also start with the players having to work out the rules. They are invited to explore the game space and work out the rules from the feedback they get, so gaming also becomes a learning experience.
Mihaly Csikszentmilahali described a kind of happiness called flow: a sense of engagment, heightened functioning and a sense of accomplishment, and concluded that games are an obvious source of flow. Other aspects of gaming include enhancement of self-image through reputation and status, and a sense of group identification.
Gamification in market research refers to the process of using game thinking and mechanics to increase the engagement and involvement with tasks that hold less intrinsic interest – like taking some surveys or continually engaging with communities. It builds on gamification processes used for websites, communities, services and advertising campaigns.
Research Through Gaming has a demo video showing how surveys can be made more enjoyable. And if you want more information you can look up the Game Access Blog.
For communities rewards (points, badges)are given for on topic posts and other activities; in surveys questions are made more interesting and playful: “We challenge you to…” “Answer in 2 minutes” ”Guess which…” while scales and sliders are made visual so they can see something happening as the response is given. Sometimes the entire survey is a game that needs to be loaded and learnt. (Note that qualitative research has been ‘gamified’ since its inception, with projective techniques and interesting questions).
Jon Puleston, senior director of GMI Interactive, describes an experiment, working with Sony, asking people to evaluate which music artists they liked. One group was put through a traditional survey approach, another was asked to play the role of a radio station owner and they were asked to build a playlist. On average the first group evaluated 82 artists before giving up; the radio station owners got through 146. Puleston has developed Qstudio, which includes 15 different ways of asking a grid question such as drag-and-drop formats that might ask the respondent to place flags along a scale or pin pictures to a target, as well as a variety of different slider-based inputs.
Theo Downes-LeGuin of Market Strategies International reported at ESOMAR an experiment of using four different level of gamification for a survey. Respondents did find gamification more enjoyable, but it took longer to complete – and the completion rate was lower. Possibly people were put off by having to load the game or confused by the task. Puleston and Deborah Sleep of Engage Research won Best Methodological Paper Award, concluding that although technology and graphics were important, more feedback could be obtained by making questions more entertaining or playful. See a prezi by Jon Puleston here
So far so good; however, developing games that fulfill all these criteria takes skill and costs time and money. It is hard to maintain the challenge and reward curve, to include a sense of mastery, and to make the survey appealing to a wide range of people. Gamification is already getting a poor reputation through examples of shallow application or poor execution.
There may also be a deeper problem with simple reward based systems. Despite strongly embedded ideas that bigger rewards lead to better performance, there in increasing evidence that where higher cognitive skills are concerned, extrinsic rewards may actually reduce performance because they take away from the pleasure of achievement. For a most entertaining exposition of this idea, watch this RSA Animate Video about Dan Pink’s Drive.
For qualitative researchers gamification has a direct application in designing workshops. For example, for a public consultation a game type workshop:
- equalises roles and levels expertise
- provides a safe environment to ask questions.
- helps find a common language and framework
- makes workshops more creative and productive.
The example game cards are from Making the Network Work, a consultation about bringing the internet to a community.
Together with John Griffiths, we devised a workshop game to teach people about Crowdsourcing, giving participants a clear objective, resource cards and people (with limitations), a competitive element and judging by the ‘crowd’. You can see it went down well. More here.
Serious Gaming is the use of games for educational, training and personal development purposes, with the entertainment objective of the game being secondary. It includes war games for the military, simulations, games used by business trainers and games for social change.
