Doing Research With a Gamified Survey: Reflections From Smart City Research

Corporate and government officials as well social scientists studying smart cities are exploring gamification to help stakeholders engage with complex technological societal issues. However, despite research addressing concerns of respondents’ engagement the validity reliability results gamified research, there hardly any empirical accounts how respondent engagement, affected by decision-making in multi-stakeholder processes designing producing research. In this paper, we evaluate a survey that developed do about public perceptions engagements digitization datafication space. We report ideas, discussions decisions design production survey. These reflections offer insights into politics such process advice for other researchers considering use tools examining seemingly invisible intangible developments, whilst at same time being critical outcomes produced. Our analysis shows why pragmatism stakeholder relations took precedence over academic epistemological concerns. Whilst produced tool did provoke large numbers different people actually city, resulting data were less rich than had aimed for, required additional, qualitative methods.