The questionnaire was answered by 31 participants in total. The gender divide was as follows: 16 male, 12 female and three other/did not want to answer, and the age divide was as follows: 21 10-14-year-olds, three 15-20-year-olds and seven 21-28-year olds.
One of the main goals of the questionnaire was to research the target audience’s gaming habits, specifically what kind of games they tend to play. Out of the 31 participants three said that they do not play mobile or video games, all three were in the 15-20 age group. As a result of this in figure 14 the purple bar indicating this age group is absent. From the remaining 29 participants answers given to question four, the different games were roughly divided under the six main gaming motivators based on their genre. The author’s own knowledge and estimation of the games was used to do this. Most participants answered the question with two or more games; therefore, the following graphs (figures 12 and 13) contain more than 29 answers in total.
Figure 12. Main motivators based on gaming habits divided by gender
Figure 13. Main motivators based on gaming habits divided by age
As seen in figures 12 and 13, the two leading motivators across the graphs are creativity, which includes design and discovery, and social, which includes
competition and community. When looking at the gender-dived data in figure 13, part of Quantic Foundry’s research findings (see section 2.2) are backed up, seeing as most males answered to be playing more social motivator game.
Surprisingly in these results, the highest-ranking motivator among females is creativity, unlike in the earlier research in which it was shown to be completion, which groups up under achievement. The same can be observed in the age-divided data. While social still ranks high, it is overtaken by creativity here as well.
When looking at the answers given, the most popular game in the creative category was Minecraft, closely followed by Sims 4.
In questions five and six of the questionnaire, participants were asked to tell if they play games or use mobile applications that use AR to research their familiarity with the technology. The answers on this question were almost perfectly divided, with 17 participants answering they do and 14 answering they do not. The group that was least familiar with AR was the group of business economics students. As expected, most participants answered to be playing Pokemon GO, with a few participants also mentioning Minecraft Earth.
Surprisingly some older participants also answered this with Instagram.
Instagram’s face filters are also AR and noticing that some participants realized that was a positive surprise to the author. When further asked about the AR functionality of Pokemon GO, all participants agreed that they do not have it turned on when playing. Most explained it to be because it either uses too much of the phone’s battery life or that it does not have enough of an incentive to use it constantly. Some of the older participants referred to it as more of a novelty, that was fun in the beginning but is now only turned on for taking funny pictures occasionally.
The last two questions of the questionnaire were related to amusement parks.
Participants were asked whether they had visited an amusement park and what they do if they must queue for rides for a long time. If they did not have previous experience of having to queue for long times, they were encouraged to imagine what they would think they would do in such a situation. They were given some answer options but also had space to add their own answers. The purpose of the
last question of the questionnaire was to see whether the participants were already on their phones while queueing. If this was the case, integrating a mobile application into the situations would be easy. All participants answered that they had been to an amusement park before and out of the 31 participants 13
answered that they would be on their phone while queueing.
The AR app testing showed that younger participants and the game design students received the technology and the applications themselves very fast and easy. Most of them seemed to be at least somewhat familiar with the technology beforehand and testing it out seemed very exciting for most of them. Especially the youngest participants could have stayed drawing with the Just A Line
application for much longer than there was time to. Exploring the museum setup in Arilyn was also interesting for these groups and kept them engaged for some time. The business economics students on the other hand were largely unfamiliar with the AR technology, and most of them had had little to no exposure to it in the past. When testing out the applications, they learned the purpose of it very
quickly, but also did not play or explore them for very long. Most of them said that since the chosen applications did not have any actual point or goal to them, there was not much for them to get enjoyment out of.
When introduced to the game application concept after both the survey and app testing was done, especially the younger participants were enthusiastic about the idea. The youngest group consisting of 10-year-olds found the idea very exciting purely on the game’s sake and seemed very excited about this new concept. In the group of 12-16-year-olds the idea was also received with high enthusiasm, but this group was already clearly more interested in the actual contents, the functionality and the execution in practice compared to the younger group. This group also initiated a conversation about whether one would be able to receive any feasible rewards from playing that could be used within the park. All the younger (under 18-year-old) participants showed interest in downloading the application were one available to them.
With the older groups of 18-28-year-old participants all agreed that the game concept itself was very interesting. Some mentioned that it will probably be very exciting and fun for younger visitors. In this age group though the majority was not sure if they would download the application for themselves if it did not offer feasible rewards to them that they could use within the park. Some said they would download it at least to try it out, especially if they were in a situation where they had to stand in queue for a long time.