What happens when a survey is no longer just a market research tool rather turns out to be an interesting game.
“Excuse me Ma’am. Can I have your few minutes please?” Salesperson asks
Consumer in Mall replies “Sure, what it is about?”
“Well ma’am, we are doing some survey to understand consumer behavior towards organic farming. Here are some questions in this paper, please you’re your responses and feel free to answer according to your choice.”
“15 questions! That will be time consuming. Sorry, will answer next time; have to finish some urgent work.” Consumer replies hastily.
The above conversation exhibits the current scenario of market research. It can be observed how difficult it has become to understand consumer behavior and their genuine responses. The implications of such market survey will definitely won’t create any impact on research or the information gathered may not be useful.
Let’s take the above conversation again. The salesperson is trying to conduct survey on organic farming. His aim to educate consumer regarding organic farming and understand their attitude while answering the survey. Through conversation, one can make out how unsuccessful that survey went and how much that consumer tried to avoid answering.
Therefore, collecting right information at right time is one of the major challenges faced by market research industry. It has been observed that numbers of respondents are shrinking because they find answering traditional surveys as tedious as well as boring task (GMI, Global Market Insight, 2007; Puleston 2011a).
At Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, under the course of Market Research and Trend Forecasting which was facilitated and mentored by Dr. Sanjukta Gosh, the context of organic farming was introduced. We were given with the same research brief, which was given to that sales person that is — “To design a survey tool to create awareness of organic farming in consumers and to understand its impact on consumer behavior.” But here the approach was radically different. To address this situation we followed the approach of “Gamification”.
Nick Pielling coined the term “Gamification” in 2003, gained popularity in 2010 when Badge Ville started using it to describe their behavior platform. Deterdinget al. (2011a, p. 9) defined gamification as “the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game context”. Basically, gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals.
Gamification Mind map
Several research papers used to understand gamification theory. After going through them, a mind map was prepared which shows the learning about Gamification.
According to the definition given by Deterdinget al. there are three important parts in the definition: game elements, game design techniques, and non-game contexts.
· Game elements are toolbox of gamification; these elements are designed systematically, thoughtfully, and artistically to create game as well as gamified services. These elements may include: points, quests, levels, progression, social graphs, badges, avatars and/or resource collections (Huotari and Hamari, 2012).
· Game design techniques involve a way of thinking, they are not just a collection of practices, but a way to approach the challenges encountered (Ahn and Dabbish, 2008).
· Anything other than the game for its own sake is a non-game context. The actions done may be game-like, but they have a purpose and intention independent of the experience of game.
While designing the game, we applied the concept of game elements and game techniques in the non-game context of organic farming. Before designing the game we did secondary research and primary research on organic farming and supply chain management.
Firsthand experience definitely helped in addressing and developing various situations and challenges in the game.
The objective of the game was –
· To make the players understand about the different stakeholders involved in the process of Organic Farming and its supply chain
· To make the players understand the working of an Organic Farm, the challenges faced in running an organic farm and the various situations that can arise in the process
· To generate a successful survey tool to analyze the players as they play the game and to also record and observe the different tactics that the player would use to win the game
Arriving at final game design is a journey in itself. Making of different game design iterations and rules associated with it which was followed by critiquing it and then again brain storming on another design.
Iteration 1 — Based on the structure of Monopoly
Iteration 2 — Based on the Structure of an Adventure Game
The initial concept of the board game was to integrate the players to collaborate together in order to understand the functioning of the organic farm, supply-chain management. 4 players in the game play the role of the 4 different stakeholders involved in the organic farming viz. Consumer, Farmer, Logistics and the Owner. The 4 players would then follow the rules of the game and play the game. The objective was to get all the four players to the finish point and then evaluate their monetary transactions in the game so as to understand whose contributions in the game lead to the success of the organic farm.
However, initial iterations couldn’t work. The four stakeholders involved in the game though had interdependencies in real life; the amount of work done by one stakeholder couldn’t be compared to another quantifiably. Hence, the concept of assigning one stakeholder to one player would deem useless in the game as the number of situations and challenges faced by one stakeholder would be different than the others
Also, it would be worthless if we came up with a game design that makes the players compete one stakeholder with another instead of making them collaborate. The players would then not learn how an organic farming works.
Then we came up with our final design -
According to werbach (2012), Game Elements include Mechanics, Dynamics and Components. In the final game, several elements were incorporated.
Dynamics are the “grammar” or the hidden structure that makes games coherent and draws the big picture. For the final game, framework of one of the familiar game was taken that is Jumanji. The pathways in Jumanji create a narrative progressing through the journey, which shows how players are interacting with the game. Each player was given 4 role players in the game viz. organic farmer, owner, logistic and consumer, where player is free to decide which one to move on rolling of dice.
Mechanics are the elements that come after planning the dynamics of the gamified service. These are the “verbs” of a game, the elements that move the action forward. Challenges, chances, competition/cooperation, feedback, resource acquisition, rewards, transactions, turns and win state are the elements which help in developing mechanism of a game design.
Mechanics of cooperation and competition was incorporated in the final game. The main of the players is collaborate among 4 stakeholder of his team and competes against other player through making decisions strategically. Some challenges were laid down viz. the “Black box” — opportunity box, where a player may earn or lose money; “Red Box” — loss box, where a player will definitely lose some money; “Green Box” — incentive, where a player earns some money as reward. In case of win state, it was decided whoever reaches the central fund first does not holds the title of winner at that point. The winner is decided after calculating players Previous Savings + Earnings through the game when all 4 stakeholders of each player reach the central fund and then comparing the total amount collected by both the players. The player whose total collection is more comparatively will take away the entire central fund including initial deposits by both the players and the total amount collected by the other player. Also all the colored boxes are supported with respective color cards, where a player has to pull out randomly one card from the deck while coming across to any of the colored boxes.
Components are the “nouns” of a game and are closest to the surface level; the simplest things to get people to progress in the game like achievements, badges, boss fights, collections, combat, content unlocking, gifting, leaderboards, levels, points etc.
In the final game design, components like points, scores were incorporated. In case of giving appropriate answers while coming across to black box the player is rewarded from the scale of 0 to 40. Leader-boards and level of difficulty in questions were also kept in the game.
Cards –
While doing survey testing, following observations were made:
· Players were excited to play the game, though we told them the game is survey a tool, this gives an insight that people love challenges and playing on them and expects some sort of reward.
· Players were easily able to earn most of incentives and hardly come across to red box. This implies that the game needs to place all three boxes in a more strategic fashion, so that player can feel some level of challenges.
· Players found difficulty in understanding some terms in the questions that means there is a possibility of educating them through few of difficult questions out of all questions.
· Players were trying to play safe and trying to achieve their gaming goal of maximizing savings and earning more. This makes them to avoid Black situation as well. For the purpose of market research, game could be design in a way where players are in the situation to answer more situations; this will make them aware of organic farming and its supply chain.
· Also, during playing the game it was realized that the cards once pulled out from the deck for incentive or loss shouldn’t be kept there again in the same deck as it reduces the challenging factor for the players.
· Sometimes during the game player couldn’t understand why they are rewarded less for comparatively similar answers
· Low score or no score tells the player when the wrong decision is being made. However, teaching them what the appropriate decision to take is was a challenge faced during the game.
· Though situations encountered by the players during the game were sufficient, but another thought can be given whether to offer the same situation played by one player before can be offered to another player.
In Conclusion, it was observed survey design should incorporate more techniques based on game-play to keep respondents engaged in the survey process. Using “Gamification” in marketing research can help improve respondents’ experience and the volume of data collected by encouraging respondents to act more freely, stimulating their imagination and making them think harder.
However, gaming techniques should be used in a way that respondent shouldn’t get lost in the game which will again the data collection for the survey rather techniques should make respondents conscious of what decisions to take while fulfilling the gaming objective.
