Gamification of research part 2: My initial infatuation fades

posted by: Ole Andresen on 12/14/2011

This is the second of my blog posts in preparation of the "Great gamification challenge", a virtual debate between thought leaders with a wide range of views on the topic. In my previous post, I tried to explain the term with some examples both of game mechanics and of companies that are working with this in research context already.

As I started to read more about gamification, my initial infatuation faded quite a bit. I realized that just applying game mechanics to something is not guaranteed to transform it into a fun experience.

Now, I love playing all sorts of games, and have spent more time than you will ever get me to admit playing them. And being a father of two, playing games continues to be a very important activity for me. However, unless a game is well designed, it can be extremely boring regardless of how many game mechanics it has built in. I am borrowing a couple of points from an excellent presentation by Sebastian Deterding here: Playing games is fun because it provides experience of competence, self-efficacy and mastery. Not because of extrinsic rewards. Playing games is fun because we enjoy overcoming the challenges and puzzles they present to us, raising the difficulty with our ability to keep it right at the point where it is neither boring nor frustrating.

For a lot of the games I am playing, I couldn't care less about the points and badges I am awarded. The badges often seem completely random, and the reward of overcoming a challenge always seems to be much more motivating than whatever points I am assigned as a consequence.

So I started to realize there is a great risk, we get it completely wrong if we think making surveys fun is as easy as just applying a few more or less random gamification techniques to our surveys.

An additional challenge is designing something with universal appeal to the target group of a survey. Because a good game experience is to present challenges that are neither boring nor frustrating, not all games appeal to all people. (And some games don't appeal to anyone.)

My four year old son is in a stage now where he loves playing the card game "War". It's a great game for kids as an introduction to cards and their values, and there are a lot of game mechanics in play. However, for adults it is utterly boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. There simply isn't any challenge in it for me (except staying awake, perhaps). I do it with him anyway, of course, but definitively not because the game is fun.

So maybe if we get gamification right for some segments, there could be segments we totally fail to attract, and we risk even to put some participants off to a larger degree than for example with a regular, normal survey.

Another factor is the novelty effect: Some games and game mechanics are fresh and exciting the first time you experience them, but that effect isn't necessarily sustainable. Foursquare was one of the first to incorporate points and badges, however this seems to wear off, and others that have tried to incorporate the same into their solutions have had less success.

Unless we are careful in how we design these solutions, we can have all sorts of unintentional effects.

At the Esomar 3D Digital Dimensions conference in October Bernie Malinoff, President of element54, presented a paper co-authored with Jon Puleston, Vice-Precident of GMI Interactive, which looked into effects of different and more creative ways of asking conventional survey questions, both with more interactive, flash-based question types, and also more "game-based" interfaces.

In their paper they demonstrated benefits in respondent experience from gamification of surveys: Respondents found the gamified version of the survey more fun, invested more time in answering it and there was less straight-lining (answering the same response across a series of grid questions).

However, they identified two potential road blocks to greater adoption and implementation of gamification for large global market research firms, some of which may be applicable also to other companies that would like to look into gamifying their surveys: