Five Reasons Gaming Has A Future In Market Research
Yesterday saw a three-hour micro-conference on gaming and research, organised by Ray Poynter. As you probably know I find this stuff very interesting anyway, so I thought I’d organise some of the thoughts I had here (and a few thoughts I nicked from other people on the very entertaining tweetstream.)
So first of all, 5 good things about “gamification” and research, and then in the next post I’ll post 5 barriers and issues.
THE GOOD POINTS
1. It works! As one Tweeter said, not using predictive markets isn’t caution, it’s head-in-the-sand. That’s one game-related method where there seems to be a ton of evidence in its favour. Meanwhile Jon Puleston had a barrage of examples of work where introducing game elements into surveys had radically increased respondent engagement with them.
2. It puts respondent engagement in the spotlight: The drumbeat of respondent engagement has been sounding for a while now - make surveys shorter! less boring! do something about response rates! But most of the commentary has been negative - telling us to stop doing stuff rather than start doing it. Gamification flips that - here is something we can actually DO which is pro-respondent and which seems more practical.
3. It’ll power the next generation of MROCs. Even if you’re sceptical about the potential for survey research to learn from gaming, its potential to inspire MROC researchers is obvious. Communities are about interaction, and games can teach us an awful lot about interaction.
4. It’s a natural fit with mobile research: With survey research, we have 60 years of learning (and tons of data) to fit new techniques into. Mobile research is more of a new frontier, so experimental techniques will be a better fit there, and an understanding of gaming culture on mobiles will lead us to an understanding of how to build compelling apps and fit research into the casual-usage culture of smartphones.
5. We already do it: Gaming is often talked about as if it’s some amazing new thing, but researchers have been using games for years - particularly in qualitative groups - and what’s more we have a decent understanding of game and reward mechanisms from many years designing incentive structures. We’re not experts exactly, but we know a lot more than we might imagine.
In the follow-up post I’ll bring on the Monday morning blues with my 5 reasons it won’t work…
