Have some fun! How playing games can uncover attitudes & motivations

HAVE SOME FUN! HOW PLAYING GAMES CAN UNCOVER ATTITUDES & MOTIVATIONS
Inspired by Oana Popa Rengle, who has recently posted about using boardgames in qualitative research, we decided to share some of our experiences from the past 10 years of games in groups.
 
1) Choose when to use
Oana says that her best results have come from using games in co-creation and innovation. We have used games with some success to answer these objectives, but also to explore choices and behaviour, and to develop attitudinal segments, especially when it comes to managing money. However, games don’t work as well for all decision making; we made a game to understand where Malaysian teens like to eat, and that didn’t prove nearly so insightful.
 
2) Adapt an existing format
Games work best when everyone gets on board quickly, so adapting a well-known formula means most players are more or less familiar with the rules from the get-go. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to make it simple. We’ve made games based on Monopoly (very loosely), as well as Snakes and Ladders, for example. Besides that, we’ve also designed our own games from scratch. If you have a board games addict in the office (or family) rope them in to make suggestions about which formats would work for what type of questions.
 
3) Make it fun and competitive … but not too much
Games don’t work if they’re not fun, and they don’t work if they don’t have a winner. But when it comes to qualitative research, games need to involve some thoughtfulness and deliberate actions, mixed in with some chance. If there is too much fun and competition, your players will play to win, and the playing itself will be less revealing of their true attitudes
 
4) Play yourself
Sounds obvious, but before you let your game loose on unsuspecting respondents, play it yourself! Not only will this iron out any flaws and give you a sense of the amount of time you need, it will start to help you understand some of the underlying themes that the game may reveal. Depending on the objectives of your research, you should aim for your game to last around 20 – 30 minutes
 
5) The Moderator’s job is to observe and think
As with all techniques and tasks, the moderator’s job is to understand what is being revealed, and probe when necessary. This may be to link the in-game behavior back to real life or consider emerging themes and how they would impact the rest of the discussion guide. We’ve asked questions both during the gameplay and at the end of the game.
 
Example:
We designed a game to understand how Muslim women manage their monthly finances. The objective was to get to the end of the month and the next paycheck. We wanted to understand how much of their money they spent vs saved, how much they were paying into fixed items (e.g. rent/ mortgage, insurance payments) vs. how much they were spending on themselves, and what happened when they encountered unexpected outlay, or windfalls . The game was very loosely based on Monopoly, with Chance cards and squares used to introduce the windfalls or unexpected outlay mentioned above.

We uncovered a wealth of attitudes through playing the game, understanding how the women planned for the future, their attitudes to credit and borrowing, the amount of control they had (or didn’t have) within their family structure, and the decision-making processes for spending. We also uncovered several psychographic segments when it came to managing money, from the rigid and regimented end of the spectrum right through to those who were barely in control.

The client found the results very insightful, and used them for both NPD and communications development down the line.
 
We’d encourage the use of games (we gamify lots of other activities as well, but that’s perhaps for another post), and we’ve found it works especially well in our some of our key SE Asian markets where ‘face’ plays a role in responses, and we need to use plenty of projective techniques to understand true motivations. They do take up time, and need to be well managed, but we’ve definitely uncovered insights which would have been tough to dig out using discussion alone.

Photo by Andrey Metelev on Unsplash