Surveys Are Videogames

They're interactive environments in which people perform actions and tasks in order to progress. The aim is to complete the experience, which ought to be a challenging and interesting one. If the experience is too difficult, or too boring, participants get frustrated and drop out. Some participants cheat, which makes the game faster to complete - but as they haven't done it properly, should their score really count?

You can extend the metaphor yourselves, I'm sure! We tend to think of the point of a research project as being the information it gathers and the interpretation we put on it. But from a participant's perspective that's not the point at all. The point is to get to the end. If it's a good project you get to the end and have fun, or find out stuff about yourself along the way. If it's a really good project you don't want to get to the end. (Those are rather rare.)

If we think like this about surveys, what can game design teach us? Quite a lot. Designers have thought a great deal about the problems of structuring an experience - increasing the challenge, keeping people's interest, giving them different things to do. As the participants become more central to research, solving these problems becomes more crucial. There's a ton of great game design writing out there and I'm only just starting to dig into it, because I find the parallels with doing social media research so intriguing. I expect I'll link to some of it here (and would love suggestions!).

So try this at semi random:  http://digitalkicks.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/what-do-we-mean-when-we-say-non-linear/ - an exploration of 'non-linearity' from the Digital Kicks blog. The writer defines three levels of non-linearity:

I don't think these questions are going away - especially as gaming and branding and services all seem to be fuzzily merging together into an app-driven world of interaction design. There's no reason why research should - or can - remain aloof.