Relevance & Research Question: Most practitioners will be aware of the concept of gamification. Fewer however will be aware of how gamification can be achieved in practice and most, we suspect, will be overwhelmed at the prospect of designing a ‘game’. In this presentation we propose a framework for understanding gamification, without the need for games. We define the key features of a game and link this to established theories of motivation and questioning practices emanating from behavioural economics. In experiment we ask the question – can simple text based gamification techniques give us richer and deeper data than our traditional questioning style?

Methods & Data: The results of two experiments will be presented. In both instances online interviewing was employed. The first experiment looks at a question of spontaneous brand awareness within the Mobile Phone category. 150 interviews per test (gamified) and control (standard) cell were undertaken. In this test we introduce a game mechanic, the question itself is unchanged. Data to be presented will be the number of brands mentioned and what those brands are. In the second experiment we conducted surveys in two countries with 600 and 300 interviews per country per cell (gamified vs non-gamified). In this experiment game consisted of adding a hypothetical scenario to and open question – getting the respondent to imagine they were speaking to the CEO. A rule that a maximum of only 3 things could be said to the CEO was added.

Results: In the first experiment the number of brands mentioned on average increased from 4 to 6. These brands were not obscure “extra” brands, but more mentions of the best known brands. This implies that our standard online questioning techniques encourage satisficing behaviour. The second experiment resulted in more content (measured by number of characters typed) and more codable content being given. The number of people giving 3 codable answers increased from 5% to 47%.

Added Value: In addition to proving again that gamification ‘works’ to increase data this paper also shows how simple it is to execute a gamified question using text alone.