Prisoner of Words: Lessons Learnt from Mobile Gamification of Lab Memory Experiments

Gamifying experiments in-the-wild showed promising opportunities in supporting participants’ engagement, increasing sample size and diversity, and saving lab and personnel resources needed for lab experiments. However, transforming memory lab experiments to mobile games is challenging as some standard game design guidelines jeopardize the validity of the experimental design. Our work draws attention to this trade-off by providing design guidelines for critical game elements, namely scoring systems and input methods. We distil those guidelines from a case study where we replicated a lab memory experiment via a mobile game apparatus and produced congruent psychological results. Our work sheds the light on the special challenges in gamifying memory experiments and encourages psychologists and game designers to investigate human memory in natural settings.