Gamifying Cognitive Tasks with Gorilla

May 25

How to gamify cognitive tasks to increase participant engagement is an online tutorial that we held in May 2022. Here we share the webinar video with you. We have also added the questions that were asked during the live session and their responses. If you have a question, please send it through using the form below, and we will follow up with a response and any other resources.

More engaging experiments means better quality data - participants are more motivated and attentive and are less likely to underperform due to boredom or fatigue. Moreover, visually rich experiences help you verify your findings persist in richer (i.e. more ecologically valid) settings. With Gorilla's Game Builder, rich games and game-like experiences are accessible to research scientists without touching a line of code.

About the Speakers

Jo Evershed - Founder CEO

Jo is the Founder CEO of Gorilla Experiment Builder, a powerful, flexible and intuitive platform for running behavioural research online. An Innovate UK Women in Innovation Award Winner, Jo is on a mission to provide behavioural scientists with tools to liberate their work from the lab and accelerate research initiatives that can be tested rigorously at scale. Jo leads a multidisciplinary team of software engineers and psychologists focused on creating powerful and accessible experimental research infrastructure.

Nick Hodges - Founder CTO

Nick is the Founder CTO of Gorilla and has been building platforms for online research for nearly ten years. Before that he worked in the videogame industry on titles such as Call of Duty, Resident Evil and Lara Croft, and has always been passionate about enabling people to build rich and compelling interactive experiences.

Additional Resources

Gorilla Game Builder

BeOnline Conference 2022

Taxonomy of Games

Participant Engagement Webinar

Treasure Games (Go/NoGo)

Samples

Gorilla Open Materials

This is Sarah Jayne Blakemore's Director Game for studying ToM in Adolescence

For 20% discount on a 1 year subscription, use the code: GORILLASAGE2022

Q&A

+ How is analysis done with games in research?

You can create whatever game you need for your research questions. Analysis is the same as for non-game tasks. You'll get the data file of all the participant responses and then you can analyse them to look at accuracy and reaction time.

+ Does your platform handle audio files?

Yes - you can have audio playback, and (soon) also audio recording.

+ What kind of research questions you can answer with this game?

This is a classic go-no-go task - so often used to look at inhibitory control. The important thing is not the mechanics of this game, but how you can add images, control stimuli, add animations.

+ Can you apply gaming techniques to online survey completion?

Potentially yes - the example with the crime scene could work (e.g. even N questions they get another clue).

+ Can we gamify physical tasks? Are such gamification complicated (e.g., requiring IoT, etc)?

It would probably require your participants to have whatever hardware you require, which would likely be prohibitively complicated/expensive.

+ Is gorilla providing different gamified experience for every experiment/task?

Gorilla includes tools that allow you to build your own games - I'll be demoing them in the second half of this session. Stay tuned!

+ I would be interesting in exploring whether this could be applied to more complex thought processes. Can you run sequential or choice dependant programmes - leading to different outcomes?

Yes - you can create games that have more complex sequences of screens depending on the choices made. Reach out and we can chat further. Feel free to send a message to @EvershedJo on Twitter.

+ Will some of those games you’ve shown be available for replication?

The games I've shown belong to researchers, so I can't share them. Some have shared them to Gorilla Open Materials to make it easy for other researchers to use. This is Sarah Jayne Blakemore's Director Game for studying ToM in Adolescence

+ Does Gorilla provide templates for various cognitive tasks, or do we have to "hard-code" the tasks into the gamification?

There are lots of samples here.

And many researchers publish their tasks to Gorilla Open Materials

So yes - often you can find the cognitive task you need, and just change the spreadsheet.

+ Can you possibly do a demo for the multiplayer? Or a “step by step” tutorial?

Here's a video of an ultimatum game: https://www.loom.com/share/b9353962a2c04874b5b2cf0739789b56.

+ Is multi-character input (e.g. words, phrases) an option for responses you can collect?

Yes - you can collect a wide range of responses including words!

+ Please explain how you’d collect data/ demographics from the game.

When you collect online data you usually have anonymous or pseudonymous IDs for participants to alleviate data security concerns. So, you’d need to add a questionnaire before the game. Essentially each response is captured - so in the treasure game with the dragon, we log whenever they press the space bar (together with whether that was the correct response or not). If they don't respond, we log a 'no-go' response at the end of the trial. The researchers can then download a CSV file where each row is one response, and also contains timing information, the participant ID, etc.

+ How to get permission from the users to gather all that data, is it okay to use a disclaimer page so users click accept on them?

You normally put a consent form at the start of your study. You’d put that in first, before they start the game. You can wire this up easily in Gorilla.