Five Reasons Gaming ISN’T The Next Research Big Thing
As promised, here’s the second half of my follow-up post to Ray Poynter’s gaming and MR mini-conference. This dose of - hopefully constructive - negativity isn’t meant to be taken alone, you should read the first post too.
As mentioned before, this is a collection of scattered thoughts inspired by gamification’s current status as a hot research topic. And this is the sceptical side of me being given rein - a list of barriers and issues.
1. Game design is REALLY HARD: One excellent trait of the research industry is its optimism about its ability to do complicated things - I will always delight in the memory of one meeting where an enthusiastic researcher asked if we could “build something like Facebook” for an ad hoc project. During the conference I tweeted that judged as games most research ‘games’ are a bit crap (see point #2 for why this is relevant). Former games journalist Kieron Gillen tweeted back to point out that judged as games most GAMES are a bit crap. Game design is very hard, and game programming is no cakewalk for that matter. People are paid a lot of money to make games that are even marginally non-bad and a jaunt round the app store suggests many don’t succeed. Do we actually have this skillset or are we just going to throw a few badges at a survey and call it “gamifying”?
2. Beware raised expectations: Apparently there has been a lengthy thread on one of the MR LinkedIn groups about whether or not we should try and abandon the word “survey” because it has negative connotations and a poor brand image. I should really do a full post on this but essentially the low expectations the word survey arouses are an advantage as well as a millstone - if you use a more fun word, like ‘game’, you’re creating expectations you may well not be able to meet.
3. Peak Badge: Out in the wider world of marketing there’s already a backlash starting against ‘gamification’, on the grounds that most attempts at it are really no such thing - they’re systems of rewards and badges tacked onto existing processes with no attempt made to think about ideas of design or play. We have plenty of experience with reward systems, but we might also be making ourselves susceptible to a wider ‘game fatigue’ which seems certain to set in once the novelty and interest of badge collecting wears off.
4. Sexy questions, dangerous answers: A tip of the hat to Bernie Malinoff for this phrase, coined in a rapidly becoming classic bit of work which demonstrated that jazzing up questions (with sliders, flash animation, etc.) had a major impact on the data collected. How much more of an impact is gaming likely to have, given that game mechanics introduce ideas of strategy and competition into processes which have been mostly free of them?
5. Who’s playing?: This seems an obvious point, but the more you build your research around game mechanics, the likelier you are to attract people who like doing games. Is this a problem? Depends what you’re asking and how representative you want your results to be, I guess. This is something most New MR techniques have in common - they are likely to favour a particular type of participant: articulate and expressive people in MROCs, online extroverts in social media monitoring, and so on. With gaming, though, the problem is twofold: people have very different styles of play (aggressive/defensive, competitive/cooperative, reflexive/strategic) and your design might favour some over others. But also, some people don’t find games interesting at all.
None of these are insurmountable, some are reframing old problems rather than creating new ones. But hopefully in conjunction with the other post this gives a more balanced look at an exciting, risky opportunity for research.
