Gamer data – the heart of the matter (oh dear)

Enough pussyfooting around with ludic.interest. We conducted this survey because we wanted to get an idea of what would encourage people to play a game that used mobile technology to engage players in the story that take place in a number of cultural heritage locations around Southampton. (Though in other news, our funding bid for that project fell at the second hurdle, so this research is likely to now be, both literally and metaphorically “academic.”)

We already know that awareness to these sorts of games is relatively low, but by seeing if there’s a relationship between any of the four Fun preferences described by Lazarro and the respondents’ stated interest in location based gaming (which itself wasn’t explicitly covered in Lazarro’s work), we might have a better idea of what sort of game mechanics appeal best to the audience we’d need to attract.

We asked four questions suggested by our technology provider in this section, where the response was recorded on a 101 point Likert scale:

If a mobile game used location would this be of interest to you?

Use this slider to show how much you’d prefer working in a team or as an individual, in a location based game.

Would you be interested in a mobile game that uses digital artefacts / objects alongside real world locations? and

How much does the game featured in this video interest you? [we used a promotional video for Chromarama]

So, the first thing I did in R was to change the variable names (which were sucked into R in the form of the whole question plus instructions about using the slider), into something that would be easier to read on plots, then create a scatterplot matrix ordered by degree of correlation:

scatterplotLocatativeFun

 

So what does that show us? That the locatative gaming  questions all seem to correlate with each other. As do the Fun preferences. But the correlation between fun preferences and locatative gaming responses is weaker. A preference for People fun, for example, only correlates with responses to the Teamwork question (and frankly I’d be worried if it didn’t!).

More worryingly, only the Hard fun preference correlates at all with the core measure of interest in a mobile game that uses location. Lets look at that in more detail:

plotHardLocatativeInterest

Oh dear. There’s the positive slope which, at first glance, suggests some correlation, but check out the confidence curve (I used the R package ggplot2 to create this). There’s space within that to flatten out the regression line. I “cannot reject the null hypothesis”. Blast! And check out all those dots down on zero, expressing no interest at all in  a locatative game! Double blast! Maybe its just as well we didn’t get the funding :(

The matrix also shows some correlation between Easy fun preference and interest in searching for digital artifacts in real-world locations. And on closer examination, the plot looks more attractive, greater interest overall, but again, I can not reject the null-hypothesis:

plotEasyArtefacts

And the so called correlation between Serious Fun preference and interest in the example video has even worse confidence intervals (and a massive p value of 0.36):

plotSeriousExample

The only positive result I’ve found so far is the apparent correlation between working in a team and finding digital artefacts, wherein I can (just about) reject the null hypothesis.

plotTeamworkArtefacts

I guess these two mechanics have some history together in the world of scavenger hunts. But it seems I can’t yet claim from this research, that the world is ready and waiting for locatative games.


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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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