State Of Play: Four Types Of Research Gamification
This time last year I was writing a talk for the inaugural Festival of New MR about surveys as videogames (you can read what I said here). The ideas in it had been bouncing around for a while but I realised there was mileage in exploring them at length.
I should say right now that I don’t want any credit for starting any kind of conversation around games in research: the word gamification had been around for a while already, and my theoretical musings were quickly trumped by more practical evidence from real pioneers like Jon Puleston. Besides, the stuff I worried and cared about most in the talk - about strategy, ideas emerging through play, unintended consequences - was the stuff nobody else seemed to run with.
And research commentators have, in general, run with games hard. Since then hardly a week has gone by without some gamification article in the research blogosphere, and no conference seems complete without some mention of it. The appetites for details, debate and debunking remain absurdly high.
It seems like a good time to take stock of the different directions ‘research gamification’ is going in right now. I’ve found four of them:
SOFT GAMIFICATION: When people talk about ‘gamification’ in research this is what they generally mean - the introduction of game or game-like elements into a project, often by means of framing a research activity (an open question, a community task, prompted recall) like a game. The people working on this have been the likes of Betty Adamou at Research Through Gaming, Jon Puleston at GMI and Tom DeRuyck at InSites. The main purpose of soft gamification is to increase engagement and richness of response, and the main objection to it is that it distorts response and is incompatible with existing norms. One crucial element of it is that participants are always fully aware that they’re doing a research project: soft gamification is NOT trying to design or invent games, it’s simply borrowing elements from them.
HARD GAMIFICATION: So if that’s “soft” gamification, what’s hard gamification? If soft gamification involves inserting game mechanics into a research project, hard gamification involves inserting research tasks into a game. In other words, participants experience the research as part of the game, rather than experiencing the game as part of the research. This approach is far rarer than soft gamification - in fact it mostly turns up as a misunderstanding or straw man by opponents of gamification asking “how are we meant to compete with Halo/Angry Birds/etc?”. Typically, research companies don’t even try and do this.
But examples do exist: Peanut Labs partnered with social game companies to offer in-game currency in return for survey completion, and we’ve begun to see start-ups mooting a survey/game fusion as a business model. Also, Research Through Gaming’s emphasis on passively collected paradata is an example of hard gamification in action. And arguably, the many post-FourSquare start ups which offer badges and points in exchange for user data are quintessential hard gamification experiences - so in the wider non-research market it’s a more dominant form.
CONTEXT GAMIFICATION: This approach shifts the focus away from trying to engage a participant, and instead embraces the idea that games can distort research data. Rather than this being a problem, runs the thinking, it offers us a chance to hack the research context by changing the emotional or behavioural states of players: for example, raising stress levels through competition in order to get truer responses about stressful household tasks or situations. The object of context gamification isn’t more data, but better data. BrainJuicer (where I work) has been pioneering this kind of thinking - my colleague Peter Harrison just won an ESOMAR award for it and is working on a quantitative pilot as we speak.
SANDBOX GAMIFICATION: And finally, a spin on gamification which might not currently really exist. Most gamification in research is essentially linear - focusing on improving or increasing responses within a pre-existing task structure. “Sandbox gamification” - calling back to my original talk last year - would be far looser, based on building ‘worlds’: environments and systems in which participants could work towards a goal using tools and materials of their choice without necessarily being railroaded into a task or question structure.
This approach exists outside research - obviously in games themselves but also in semi-planned environments like online communities, social networks, etc. (and it’s notable how play - the invention of new collaborative games - is so prominent an activity in these spaces). But research gamification is necessarily more rigid, so sandbox gamification is likely to remain more a possibility than a reality for now. Though I’d be delighted to be proved wrong!
