OPINION21 March 2012

Gamification and the infotainment trap

Gamification is hot right now, and no wonder. It’s the perfect retort to people who warn of the death of surveys. Here, at last, we have a way to make surveys fun and engaging, to make it an experience people want to take part in. But the course of gamification doesn’t always run smooth.

Gamification is hot right now, and no wonder. It’s the perfect retort to people who warn of the death of surveys. Here, at last, we have a way to make surveys fun and engaging, to make it an experience people want to take part in. But the course of gamification doesn’t always run smooth.

MRS Conference heard this morning from Engage Research director Andy Barker and Heinz consumer insight manager Lisa Hunt who embarked on an experiment to try to gamify a focus group about soup.

Instead of the normal group discussion, participants took part in game-like exercises, some based on familiar party games. In one instance they were tasked with using only five words to describe soup, while in another they were challenged to make a sentence about soup by asking each member to say one word that followed on from the person before them.

Did it work? Yes and no. Hunt said engagement levels were “great” and that the responses they obtained were similar to those collected from the firm’s Facebook page. “That gives it credibility,” she said.

Barker, on the other hand, was less impressed. “It’s not naturally introspective,” he said, and he worried that the games “disrupted the dynamics of the group”.

“I think it started to get on people’s nerves because there was too much energy,” Barker said. Gamification “runs the risk of turning qual into infotainment”, he warned.

James Verrinder

@RESEARCH LIVE

1 Comment

Marc Friedman

12 years ago

This article shines an important light on how there are still fairly common misperceptions of a game versus gamification. The tactics described by Barker and Hunt are clearly games and clearly not gamification. The latter requires some notion of incenting desired behaviour through the use of objectives directly related to the desired behaviour, feedback, and a sense of achievement/accomplishment through some form of rewards. The activities described above exhibit none of these characteristics. As Gamification as a strategy still works its way into mainstream, there will be the occasional misunderstanding that simply "making something fun" counts as Gamification. Agree with Barker that playing games would be disruptive and counterproductive, as he noted. A well-thought-out Gamification strategy, employing the necessary elements listed above, will in fact strengthen the dynamics of a group and will generate positive results. That said, I am hard-pressed to think of a viable strategy for gamifying a focus group. "Correct answers" cannot be rewarded, since there are no correct answers in a focus group. Participation during the focus group is a behaviour that the moderators desire, but rewarding participation during a focus group has the potential to incent people to make comments whether they mean them or not just to achieve the reward, thus tainting the feedback and having the *opposite* results as desired. Gamification can be a powerful technique in the right circumstances, but the strategy must be well-planned, and the execution must truly be gamification as opposed to simply a game.

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