Mobile Gamification for Experiment Data Collection: Leveraging the Freemium Model

Classic ways of gathering data on human behaviour are time-consuming, costly, and are subject to limited participant pools. Gamification provides a motivation to participate, but also requires the development of specialized, research-question specific games that can be costly to produce. Our solution leverages the popular Freemium model of play to motivate voluntary participation by rewarding players for participation in microexperiments with in-game powerups, using a robust framework to study multiple unrelated research questions within the same system. We deployed our game on the Android store and compared it to a gamified laboratory version and a non-gamified laboratory version, and found that players who used powerups were motivated to do the microexperiments.