Qualitative Research

Qualitative Research
Qualitative Research is a “must” research plan as it’s used by almost every major business in order to understand their customers minds. It plays an important part in selling your product and satisfying your customers. Satisfying customers is very important when it comes to selling, because it’s a very powerful way of creating bonds between people and your products, bonds that could potentially bring you more customers.  Bonds such as customer trust, loyalty and satisfaction would result in more money heading your way. It will also improve the chances of word spread between people, and if they enjoyed your product, then good news will be spread.
Learning from this kind of research can prove to be very beneficial, as that information can be used to improve your services/products. Such improvements that can help target you services/products towards your real audience.  Qualitative research is always beneficial as it can reveal mistakes or faculties in your product that you may have not seen. It is a version of data collection. A second opinion is always the best for production.

A good example of an industry that requires this effective research is the food industry. The food industry is all about advertising their products and selling them to the right target audience. It requires knowing what different ages of people like and need when it comes to food. It’s all about what sells, which is always what people like, unlike the gaming industry which can generally be any game, as long as it’s designed the right way. In the gaming industry, if you want to make a new type of game (finding a gap the industry that hasn’t been filled), which tends to be very risky, and so, you would have to create a beta first, which can result in feedback from the audience which is perfect research material when used right. But in the food industry, it’s very different, research into your new idea must be done, and then beta like “free tasters” would be used to give people a taster of your new idea in this business.

Qualitative research is verbal communication between a seller and a buyer. This verbal communication is needed when it comes to selling your products because it involves understanding what people like, don’t like, want, don’t what and all their interests.
There are many different ways this type of research can be carried out, and each one can be used to help a business prepare a marketing plan, doing a SWOT analysis, product development, branding ad pricing.  Each of these methods require face to face contact with people who are familiar with your business, which can work especially well when it comes to games, because it gives the players a chance to give verbal feedback.  Feedback is always best given face to face with actual evidence to fully explain to creators what some problems might be with a game.
In the gaming industry, verbal communication such as qualitative research always comes under product development.  When a producer of a game wants to get his game across before it’s fully actually fully complete, he/she must bring out a beta for their game in order to see what people think of what they’re game is so far. This way they can also be given improvements towards the final product game.

Game producers usually need in depth analysis of an interpretation of observation, to help with development. As products only sell because of the people, it has become imperative that companies take the opinions of their customers. Although, betas have proven to not always resemble the real game its self. A good example of this would be Battlefield Hard-line. Like most popular and most anticipated games, the producers of battle field Hard Line (Ea) decide to bring out a fully free beta that involved most mechanics of the game and gave a great demonstration of what this next Gen game could do. It impresses of reviewers and ended up getting great feedback towards its future success. Unfortunately, when the actual game came out in March, it was not so good. Both the console and PC versions of the game contained uncountable bugs in the game play and system mechanics. Its full release was a massive failure as all the servers would always crash, or fail to function. Even the games campaign mode was riddled with glitches and technical problems that you wouldn’t expect to find in a next Generation game. The very multiplayer weaponry and customer design was said to have downgraded and gotten worse than the previous Battle field games, and couldn’t get any worse. This is why quantitative research is very important and is always needed. This only happens when game designers don’t take the people’s opinions and expectations into account. With thorough research into what the old battle fields were missing and what the new hard-line needs, it could have been a much more successful game. This proves to be a perfect example of poor development and poor post research into the interest of the majority of the population.

Such bad research and game development could have been avoided if in depth analysation was done before and after the beta. Here are some examples:

·         The study of players and their behaviours

·         Sex, Violence, Learning

·         Stimulus games

·         Audio visual analysis of player experience

·         An introduction of Game play data visualization

·         Systematic interviews

·         Grounded theory

Game designers/producers of today often use many of these examples of research and development when it comes to creating their game/games. It’s not noticed as often as it should be but games designers use a lot of psychological methods to getting to give their games different effects. They will always use different types of ways to call out to the players in different levels of personal interference. This is how games are able to grasp the attention of millions of individual people with one game, they use small habits and developments into the game that subconsciously grasp your mental attention, or make you feel a certain way.
Such effects are used in horror games. For example, jump scares. A Jump scare is the typical way to get an easy “jump” out of your players. This method was researched into through qualitative research. In order for developers to create a horror game that different to the other horror games that have already be made, they must make in depth research into what scares, horrifies and
intrigues people’s minds. People don’t always like playing scary games, but it the thought of the unknown in the game that makes people have the urge to play your game. This mentality is accord through small interactions in the game that you wouldn’t actually notice unless someone was to tell you. All this is only possible through mental research into human interests.
My final example would be research into addictiveness and how it can affect the way people do or think about things.
Research into this could mean that your game becomes the only thing the players (your target audience is) will be thinking about for the next couple weeks. Causing this affect onto your players could take complex development of your game. But it can be done, because it has been done before. The secret is stimulus and repetition. The human mind loves repetition, especially when it requires multiple challenges that cause the brain to work at its full potential and push its limit to better senses. Call of Duty is a perfect example of stimulus game that requires intense reflex and concentration. This is why many COD players cannot stop playing and killing once they start. There are many different stimulus effects in this game that causes repetition.
Another good stimulus to the brain is the excitement and satisfaction of kills/points. For some reason the human mind fully enjoys and gets a pleasure from getting scores after killing a figure an a game. Every humans being will always feel some sort of accomplishment after killing in a game. Some say it’s because we hide our wild sides continuously in the real world and so we take a game as an escape for releasing these feelings. Whatever the case, it gets people’s attention and attraction, while making them happy too. The feeling of gaining a reward after killing them too also gives people a sense of achievement. Hence when people get a kill streak, they are very excited and feel very satisfied. This can also work with a simple 2d game; it does not have to be a full speed, intense, complex masterpiece that makes players completely brain washed, thinking that they are actually killing. A simple enemy and a gun will do in any style.
Along with kills, competition really influences the mind to play more, until that challenge has been met. It tends to cause a lot of stress known as “rage quitting” but the benefits out way the negative effects. The thought of being able to beat another player or prove that you are better your dominance over someone will never fail to push people to keep playing. Players will never be able to quench that feel. This affect has always been present in such fast pace games, and now has evolved to another potent level of addictiveness. Even though old versions of Call of Duty also can give the player such feelings of reward and obsession, it wasn’t always interned. But now days, research is needed carried out into the old the games, and why they were capable of making players feel in such a way so well.
In conclusion, Qualitative research is used to gain an understanding of a wide range of peoples view on a subject and their opinions, usually for motivation, Hypothesis’s, insight on problems or idea development.