Thank you, everybody who completed my survey

I took the survey off line today. 226 people responded, though 33 didn’t answer all the questions. Still that isn’t a bad sample size. Thank you to everyone that participated, even if you didn’t manage to answer all the questions. A quick scan though the answers tell me these things:

  • Mobile games have an awareness issue. Eleven people had never heard of Minecraft, 112 people had’t heard of Cut the Rope. 178 people haven’t heard of Ingress, the AR game that according to some sites, is “taking the world by storm.” Just 32 people said they’ve played a game that uses their device’s location.
  • Specialist gaming handhelds are the least popular play medium. 121 respondents said they “never” used a device like a Nintendo 3DS or Sony PSVita. And only 47 said they “sometimes”, “mostly” or “always” used one. By way of comparison only 51 people said they “never” used a phone to play games, and 124 said they “sometimes”, “mostly” or “always” used one.
  • Of the 202 respondents that answered the question about their phone, 97 have an Android, 67 an Apple, 22 don’t have a smartphone, eleven use a windows phone, and five a Blackberry.
  • SMS is the most popular method of messaging, 109 said they use it daily, compared to 30 for iMessage, 23 for Google, nineteen for WhatsApp, and 11 for Snapchat.
  • Facebook is the most popular social network still. 110 people said they use it daily.
  • Of the 193 people who answered the question on age, one was over 60, 59 between 41-60, 83 were 26-40, 47 were 16-25 and three claimed to be under 16.
  • 101 said they loved in the UK

But that’s just a first look through. The real interesting stuff will come after I’ve crunched the numbers on gaming motivations.


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I came to cultural heritage via five years working at Midland Bank when I left school. In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said “we could make a business out of this” I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players’ investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters’ degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier’s “space syntax,” and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the “small business” end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we’ve returned Rudyard Kipling’s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust’s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams’ achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.

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