games in research

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What defines a game?

The starting point for all this is to understand what turns an activity into a game.

There are all types of activities that we could call games, some more obvious thanothers. A game is just about any form of thinking activity that we do for fun and thatcould encompass playing conventional games such as eye spy, chess, cards, sports,right through to video games. But in pure game theory terms, watching TV, gardening,cooking, photography, even sex could all be seen as games.

There is often very little to differentiate work tasks from games other than anelement of fun and a few silly rules. If I asked you to carry a 10kg bag for 10km youwould probably expect payment, however if I give you a stick and a challenge to hit aball with it along the route in the minimum number of touches it has beentransformed into a game called Golf -which people pay to do.

Think of the hours kids spend playing computer games that often centre around quiteserious problem solving, requiring the same intellectual input as doing mathhomework would demand. Or take our willingness to climb up mountains for the sakeof challenging ourselves in comparison to our unwillingness to walk any sort of distance if you feel you are being forced to do it, at an airport terminal as anexample.

So, you could perceive of a market research survey as being a game too.Unfortunately just rather boring ones in the majority of cases.

The impact of making surveys fun

The main problem we face with online research is motivating people to take part in

surveys and give us their full attention during the time they are completing them. Thekey reason for this problem being in existence is simply that surveys are generallyseen as being boring. In a recent study published by Survey Nation, 58% of respondents said they don’t like doing surveys.

Source:http://blog.vovici.com/blog/bid/51233/ 58-of-Respondents-Don-t-Like-Surveys

We play games for fun, for entertainment, and so the first hurdle to cross whenrepositioning surveys into more game-like experiences for the respondents is toensure that they do come across as being a fun process.

We have discovered that just by telling respondents from the outset of a survey thatwe would like them to play a survey game - as opposed to doing a survey, in effect

this is a bit of Neural Linguist Programming – that there is a measurabletransformation in the respondents attitude and approach to the survey.

Here is an example: We conducted an experiment whereby we ask two groups of respondents to take part in an identical media touch point survey where we askedthem to evaluate their consumption and use of a range of different media. In one cellwe presented the survey in the usual traditional way and in the other we told themthey were about to play a game where the objective was to plan an advertisingcampaign.

To re-enforce this we created a customized introduction page (see image below) andmade a few adjustments to the wording of the questions to make them sound moregame like, however the tasks they were asked to perform were essentially identical.



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In some experiments we have found less than half of respondents properly readingquestions.* and at the end of longer surveys up to 80%* of respondents showedsigns of speeding and recording pattern answers.

*Source ESOMAR Puleston & Sleep 2008

Ways of changing the style of questions

If you are thinking about gamifying your survey, to begin with you need to think aboutadopting a more engaging approach to the way you actually word the questions. Putyourself in the mindset of a good TV interviewer like Opra, would she start aninterview by asking anyone “on a scale of 1 to 10!”

There are various techniques that can be used to encourage respondents to want toread and answer questions. Here are a few basic techniques that we recommend:

1. Personalization2. Emotionalization3. Projection4. Forced imaginary situations5. Fantasy

1. Personalization: one of the most powerful techniques you can use to reframequestions to make respondents more interested in answering them, is to makethe question seem like it is all about them.

So a question such as “Which of these is your favourite colour?” could bepersonalized by asking it: ”If you had to paint your room in one of these colourswhich one would you pick?” Now I recognize that the question has changed hereand will affect the overall character of the answer, but how you personalizequestions can be very easily adapted to the relevance of the questions. Say itwas a car survey; you would be talking about the colour they would like their carto be.

We have found that respondents will spent upwards of 20% extra time thinkingabout questions when they are reframed to include a more personal context.

2. Emotionalization:(appreciate this is a made up word!) This is about triggeringsome latent feelings that would encourage respondents to really think about thequestion.

An example of this might be changing a question that reads “what would youwear?” to “what would you wear on a first date?”

This is a form of personalization too but one that targets emotion. We find anemotional trigger in a question can encourage up to 50% more considerationtime and feedback from respondents.

3. Projection: this is a common technique used in qualitative research - asking toimagine something in the minds eye of someone else. This is a very powerfulengagement technique to use in online surveys. As an example a question mightbe “what do you think about this new product?” . Change this to “Imagine youare the boss of a company. Your job is now to evaluate this new product…”

We have conducted various experiments using this technique and found that itcan easily encourage up to twice as much attention and feedback fromrespondents when used in the right way.





4. Forced imaginary situations: Forcing imaginary situations on respondents whendone in a creative way can really help respondents stop and think about a topic.So in relation to a clothes choice question you might say something along thelines of “Imagine you spilt coffee all over your trousers and had to quickly go outand buy a replacement pair...” The idea is to add a slight twist to differentiate

the question and make it really standout from the usual pretty humdrum everyday type.

5. Use of out and out fantasy: The next level up from this is the use of out and outfantasy which is an especially powerful way to construct questions to be moreinteresting to respondents to answer. Take, for example, the earlier question“what clothes would you wear?” instead ask “What would you wear if you weregoing to appear on TV?”, “What would you wear if you had all the money in theworld”, “Imagine you won a holiday to Paris and part of the prize was a clothesshopping spree...”. What we have found in our research is that the moreimaginary the framework of the question the more respondents enjoy answeringthem and the more feedback they will give you.

Anchor in your mind the idea that fun means more feedback.

The application of rules to questions

Abstract rules are a core constituent of most games – rules can be use to transformalmost any task into a game. The trick to do it effectively is to make them strict, silly,abstract and irrational. To make a car journey more fun you might add a rule thatsays that if you pass a red car you earn a point and a pink car you lose a life. Or if youpass a magpie you have to salute it. If you scientifically analyze what differentiatesgames from work they all boil down to rules and rewards.

Some of the techniques outlined above to make questions more engaging are in factrule setting processes - if you were think about it in strict theoretical terms.

We have found that applying strict rules to how respondents answer questions canreally transform questions into games in the mind’s eye of respondents.

Here is what quite a famous example is now:

Question =“Please describe your favorite meal"Question with rule =“imagine if you were on death row and had to plan your lastmeal what would you order?” i.e. rule is that it is their last meal

Question = 3 words per respondentQuestion with rule =15 words per respondent

See just how much more information was divulged when the question was gamifiedin the image below:



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3. Whittling down rules: forcing respondents to make decisions is anotherinteresting way of asking people to respond to questions… Examples...

Out of your clothing collection, if you had to pick 5 items of clothing thatreflect you best, which would you pick?If you were to go on holiday and you could only take 3 outfits with you, onefor daytime, one for evening wear and one for a special occasion...

Sending respondents on Quests

If you study the evolutionary roots of game play it is believed that our propensity toplay games evolved to help us hone and develop our survival of the fittest skills;particularly our hunter gathering skills. Hunter gathering missions could last severaldays during which time we learnt to maintain extended periods of concentration anddial down all other distractions on our brains. We used games to practice this.

Many of the best games out there flip people directly into this hunter gather mindset. Think about some of the most successful video games such as Call of Duty or Worldof Warcraft where they encourage people to spend hours at a time often doing quitemundane tasks in an effort to complete a quest mission.

We discovered that this same thinking could be applied directly to question design.By rewording questions to come across more like quests and missions we found theycould significantly increase the amount of time respondents were prepared to spendanswering them.

We found that a question such as “How much do you like these music artists…”could be reworded to “Imagine you owned your own radio station and could play any

music you liked, which of these artist would you place on your play list..”. The numberof artists respondents were prepared to rate increased from 84 to 148. The wordinghad made it more relevant to respondents; it had a point, it had become a quest andas a result they focused more on the task and spend twice as much time doing it.

In another experiment where we were exploring how to encourage respondents togive richer feedback to some advertising we were evaluating, instead of askingpeople to watch the ad and tell us what they thought, we asked a group of respondents to “imagine you worked for an advertising agency and were about to seea sneak preview of a TV campaign from a rival agency for a rival brand. You have toreport back on what you think of it”. Again this had turned the task more into a questand the volume of feedback increased from 14 to 52 words per respondent.

This is a very versatile technique that can be applied in all manner of differentquestion circumstances. Basically it is about adding a reason for doing a task thatmeans something to the respondents.

Scenario planning

In a similar vein, the frontal cortex of our brains has specifically been developed toscenario plan and many of the games we play are centered around scenario planning“what if…” and other imaginary situations.

Changing a question to evoke a more scenario planning process is another way of making questions come across as more game-like for respondents.

Instead of asking “what words would you use to describe this brand”, you could ask“imagine this brand was a human being, what words would you use to describe this



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Despite being more work for respondents, their enjoyment rating scores actuallyincreased by 10%.

Working with Sony developing an Ethnographic research study we added a rule thatthey had to imagine they were being interviewed by a magazine and that what theywrote would be published. The impact of this was that respondents spent 30% more

time answering the survey and overall word count increased from 230 to 350 words.It was a far more interesting tasking when reframed in this way.

Ensuring it is an accomplishable challenge

For games to be successful they need to be viewed as an accomplishablechallenge with the right balance of luck and skill. Make a game appear too difficultand few people will want to do it – playing a musical instrument is a good exampleof this, it’s a game in every sense of the word. If you can play an instrument well, itdelivers tremendous rewards, but because it is seen as difficult to learn very few of us take it up. On the other hand make a game seem too easy and again, fewpeople will be motivated to play it. An example of this might be “eye spy”. So when

you design question games you need to pitch them in the sweet spot between easyand difficult.

Part 2: Designing questions to be more game-like

The next area to look at is the actual design of questions and how these can bemade more game-like.

1. Using more imagery

Most computer games are enormously visual experiences and so if you want a surveyto become more gamifyed then imagery has a vitally important role to play.

All the research we have conducted over the last 4 years has show us thatrespondents much prefer answering the more visual based questions. Shifting to amore visual based questioning technique can see respondent enjoyment levelsimproving from a score of 3 out of 10 to 8 out of 10.

During one experiment (which I would not encourage anyone to reproduce in real lifeas we would not encourage any survey to take longer than 15 minutes) we took a 40minute survey and created 2 identical versions – one with and one without imagery.We compared the dropout rate and also the propensity to take part in a follow upsurvey and had a granular look at the data generated.

30% more people completed the survey and in like for like questions we were getting

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Who responds to game mechanics?

The answer to the first question is nearly EVERYONE! Well if you pitch it right. Basicword play rule based survey games we have measured over 95% active participation.

We have run upwards of over 100 game experiment over the last year and I canname less than a handful that did not solicit more rather than less activeparticipation than the question asked in a more traditional way.

We have more recently been conducting some large scale muti country experimentsin Asia to look at how different cultures respond to survey games and the pictureappears to be the same. Be it China, India, Japan Korea, in all the markets we havetested so far they seem to respond positively to survey game play mechanics withalmost equal levels of enthusiasm.

What impact does it have on the data?

Well the answer to this question is not inconsiderable. Often the results can be quite

measurably different. The there are several factors the influence this. Firstly if youengage people and they think more, you often get more response, which is a goodthing, I would say that is the primary difference. On the down side some game playmechanics particularly those based around predictive point scoring tasks can badlysteer data of course if people’s desire to win gets in the way of giving honestresponses. There are also differences that arise down to the shifts in people mindsetwhen they play a games, they may be more enthusiastic which can push up brandevaluation scores for example.

Conclusion

Over the last 4 years of research we have done to explore how to improve thefeedback from online surveys gamification is the most powerful and effective means

we have ever come across to encourage respondents to put more thought and effortinto taking part.

However, there is no escaping the fact that it is a creative solution. There are no out-of-the-box techniques other than perhaps point-based scoring mechanisms. Most of the other ways to gamify surveys require copywriting and design skills, as well as thetechnical expertise needed for the effective delivery of games in surveys.

Think of gamification like advertising. Good advertising can help sell more products,but bad advertising won’t. Likewise, a well-executed game in a survey can betransformative and result in better feedback, but a badly executed one won’t havethe same impact and could possibly steer data in the wrong direction.

Designing survey games is a creative art form and akin to the skill required todesigning good advertising i.e. not something that everyone is capable of doing. There is also the difficulty of squaring off the objectives of a piece of research withthe objectives of a game as often when we have thought about putting some of theseideas into practice we have found the two can lead you in different directions sothese techniques do require quite a pragmatic approach.

There are two ways of going about the gamification of survey, the field of dreamsapproach, design a game and then finding a research application for it or take a taskand work out how to make it more game without impacting too much on the data,both these technique require a huge amount of experimentation.

My heart lies in the first approach and I see gamification opens up opportunities to

develop whole fresh research techniques but I understand that most researchershave to deal with the practical execution of these types of idea to fit real worldresearch problems what we have learnt over the course of this programme of




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research is that all these techniques do require a considered amount of piloting andexperimentation to get right. You must be aware that some of these techniques canthrow up big differences in data for various different reasons. With that in mind, Iwould do nothing other though than encourage you to go out and explore some of these techniques yourself. I hope this paper has demonstrated some new avenues

for thinking about how to construct online surveys.

Notes on methodology

Nearly all the experiments quoted here have been conducted using simple test andcontrol cells research techniques using small sample of around 100 to 200respondents per cell and are mostly taken from experimental work conducted by GMIin association with Engage Research. As a result we do not wish to purport theresults of any of these experiments to be anything other than descriptive anecdotalevidence about the impact of game play. These experiments have very much been ageneral exploration of this topic. We have been conducting some more robustsample trials of all the main gaming question techniques we have pioneered and theresults of this next wave of research will be presented at several upcoming global

market research shows.

LEARN MORE

For other questions regarding GMI Gamification, please visit www.gmi-mr.comoremail [email protected]

GLOBAL HEADQUARTERS | Seattle, USA | Tel: +1 206-315-9300

AMERICAS | Seattle, USA | Tel: +1 206-315-9300 ASIA PACIFIC | Sydney, AUS | Tel: +61 2 9290 4333 EMEA | London, UK | Tel: +44 (0)20 7399 7010

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