We motivate based on experience – that’s why the NetCoGame Research Centre measures gamers

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Computerworld talked to Gergő Juhász ‘Alta’, Deputy Head of JátékosLét Research Centre and Creative Director of Good People Everywhere.

The NetCoGame JátékosLét Research Centre, established in 2014, was the first and still the only Hungarian research centre where games and gamification are the main profile. In the time since then, they have not only attracted the attention of the public because of their annually published JátékosLét Research, but also because they have proven with several successful projects that gamification can be an effective tool for any company, if it is created in the right way and targeted to the right audience.

Among other things, this is what Gergő “Alta” Juhász, Deputy Head of Research and Creative Director of Good People Everywhere talked about in an interview that he gave to Computerworld.

Computerworld: What brought the research centre to life?

Gergő Juhász: Dr. Richárd Fromann, the founder of the research centre, was initially concerned with the question of why a person spends hours in front of a computer for intangible things like getting a more powerful weapon in a game, while the same person might get bored after ten minutes in a maths class. I should add that this was at a time when we were constantly hearing in the mainstream media about the negative, sometimes so-called harmful effects of computer games, and no one was investigating whether they had any positive aspects, and if so, what they were.

The establishment of the research centre itself took four years after the first ideas were formulated, but today we have achieved the goal we set out earlier, and we provide various gamification solutions and developments that improve motivation and efficiency at both individual and organisational levels, for example, by applying gaming elements, gaming mechanisms and gaming dynamics to non-gaming areas of life.

CW: You have been helped in this by a special, internationally unique series of research that has been conducted on Hungarian gamer communities since 2011.

JG: Yes. The interest was demonstrated by the fact that nearly 10,000 people responded to our first JátékosLét survey on a voluntary basis. We reached them through micro-communities of different games, opinion leaders and moderators. Repeated year after year, the survey revealed certain patterns and even categorised players according to different motivational dimensions using a typological model of game motivation. To mention just two extreme types: there are the competitive players, for whom winning is the most important driving force, and the imaginative, collecting players, who are comfortable in their own little world and who are more interested in exploration and in getting to know the terrain and levels as well as possible. I think I can admit that I’m very much a hardcore gamer: I’m a leader-competitor, I like to play a high social role, it’s important to do well so that my fellow players know that I can be counted on. I try to play the same role in my profession.

CW: Which professionals from different fields contribute to the success of your work?

JG: Currently, the team is made up of psychologists, sociologists, andragogists, media and game design experts and development specialists, and thus also functions as a multidisciplinary knowledge centre for gamification research and development.

CW: How do the results of research help companies?

JG: In gamification, we use a lot of things that we’ve gleaned from our research, from our conclusions. On the one hand, there are the “game types” that we mentioned earlier, i.e. the users for whom a system needs to be adapted for optimal functioning, but also the role of motivation and communities. It is often the case that, although a person could work in better conditions for a higher salary, he or she does not change jobs because of his or her colleagues. No better example is needed to understand the power of community. This mentality is also evident in video games. It can be simulated by gamification elements, and even evoke the feeling of working in a team towards a common goal, or of having an experiential learning process, either in a team or in competition with each other.

Basically, we are approached by companies from a wide variety of fields, with a wide variety of goals. For example, we were recently approached by the management of an online gym after they were confronted with the problem that their clients, who could “subscribe” to a particular coach whose advice they could follow from home, were losing motivation over time and were using their services less frequently. The owners wanted to use gamification solutions to change the attitude of their guests. Think about it, the effect of a workout is the result of months of work, it becomes visible, so at any moment we can lose our motivation, i.e. we know the goal, we can say what body we want to see in the mirror, but we can’t see the path to it. As a solution, we suggested that guests could earn reward points after each workout, move up levels to get on leaderboards and redeem points for real objects. This would provide them with the necessary feedback after each training session in the short term and a virtual certificate of achievement in the medium term. These tools make it less likely that a guest will give up halfway through, so that they can achieve the long-term results they set themselves when they first started. Few people may think it today, but with the right solutions, we can get people to do things that may be out of their comfort zone. We are motivated by experience.