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How games can make behavioural science better

Wordle, Minecraft and Scrabble are played online by millions. Gamifying experiments can make behavioural research more inclusive, rigorous and reproducible — if it’s done right.
By
  1. Bria Long

    1. Bria Long is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, California, USA.

  2. Jan Simson

    1. Jan Simson is a graduate student in the Department of Statistics at LMU Munich, Germany.

  3. Andrés Buxó-Lugo

    1. Andrés Buxó-Lugo is an assistant professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo, New York, USA.

  4. Duane G. Watson

    1. Duane G. Watson is professor of cognitive science and of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

  5. Samuel A. Mehr

    1. Samuel A. Mehr is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA, and director of the citizen-science platform themusiclab.org.

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When US cognitive scientist Joshua Hartshorne was investigating how people around the world learn English, he needed to get tens of thousands of people to take a language test. He designed ‘Which English?’, a grammar game that presented a series of tough word problems and then guessed where in the world the player learnt the language. Participants shared their results — whether accurate or not — on social media, creating a snowball effect for recruitment. The findings, based on data from almost 670,000 people, revealed that there is a ‘critical period’ for second-language learning that extends into adolescence1.

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Nature 613, 433-436 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00065-6

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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