Mobile Gamification For Crowdsourcing 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. Crowdsourcing offers a reduction in operating costs and access to a diverse and large participant pool; however issues arise concerning low worker pay and questions about data quality. 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 combines gamification and crowdsourcing in a smartphone-based system that emulates the popular Freemium model of play to motivate voluntary participation through in-game rewards, 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 the in-game rewards were motivated to do experimental tasks. There was no difference between the systems for performance on a motor task; however, performance on the cognitive task was worse for the crowdsourced game. We discuss options for improving performance on tasks requiring attention.