Game Design Document

After much discussion today, we came up with a story for our game. The name is not yet decided. I have included a name just for convenience. I prepared a one-page game design document that sums up all the work that we would need to do in the coming weeks. 

Game Design Document

In the coming weeks several features maybe modified, but this is a good place to start with. Finer aspects of the implementation should be chalked out as and when we progress with the project.

Incentives to Participation

Found this in an article a while ago. Figured it might be useful in designing our game.

Incentives to participation

In different human-based computation projects people are motivated by:

• Receiving a fair share of the result
• Direct monetary compensation
• Desire to diversify their activity
• Aesthetic satisfaction
• Curiosity, desire to test if it works
• Volunteerism, desire to support a cause of the project
• Reciprocity, exchange, mutual help
• Desire to be entertained with the competitive spirit of a game
• Desire to communicate and share knowledge
• Desire to share a user innovation to see if someone else can improve on it
• Desire to game the system and influence the final result

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-based_computation

Questions to Address after the initial prototype

Here are some of the questions we need to address once we are done with our initial prototype:

1. Will our game be re playable ?

2. What will be the social aspect of the game ? ( sharing? )

3. Will there be an achievement system ?

4. What will make a person play the game ?

5. What makes the game Addictive ?

6. What is innovative about this game? 

7. Is it a competitive game? collaborative?

8. is it about collection or is it about images ?

The Two Game Ideas

The team went through quarter presentations successfully. Looks like all the faculty have an idea of what we are upto. Many even felt that we have a solid process in place. For this week, we discussed about how we wanted to proceed further.
1. There should be a facebook oriented outlook, which focuses on facebook and database specific challenges.
2. There should be game idea discussions and prototyping.


For now, we have decided to collect the Name and Location of the objects in the image. 


Accordingly, we have come up with the following two ideas about our game.


1. Lazer Tag - Shoot Lazer at the image where-ever you want. the objective would be to cut out the object. once the object is cut out, it would gain life of its own ( shown through animation and sound effects ) and would fly around the screen. Perhaps it could fly into your 'box' where you could use it for something later. this method tags the objects,but there is no method for verification. The idea is to extend lazer into other cutting tools like chainsaw, scissors, etc and make it addictive.


2. Flip tiles - To verify what has been cut from (1), we decided to have the flipping tiles game. the player is shown an image and it is covered with tiles. The player has to flip the right tiles to uncover the object. Minimum number of tiles flipped would merit more points. It is assumed that the chances for both the players to tag as well as uncover the wrong object is minimal. It is also assumed that it would be a good idea to introduce a character into the game. The character itself can be a 5 lined comic figure which happens to be your cursor. This would make the player to be emotionally attached to the game. 


So the team is currently prototyping the games (1) and (2) and would like to infer the results from play. The team is also concurrently working on setting up a database to host our game on facebook. A game that was developed for Game Jam ( Pepe ) is being uploaded onto facebook, so that the team will know about the process.

Meeting with the Client

-The team is in the process of aggregating the information collected so far into a report that summarizes what we have done.

-Also, we are preparing for a presentation that gives an overview of what can be expected for the rest of the semester.

Prototyped a rough interaction that possibly gives cues to what can be expected: Fun, Addictive, Simple, Quick and Specific

-This is a simple game where the player tries to reveal object hidden behind the tiles.

-By making the tiles arbitrarily small or by adding a game mechanic to it, we can make it a game which in turn adds interest to what is being pursued.

-As mentioned before, there can be the 'taggers' and 'finders' concept in this.

Notes from Meeting:

-Collect attributes of objects in image like location, name, number of objects, etc

-Additional tags to objects in the form of adjectives gives more detail about the objects.

-There can be a relationship between the objects or the attributes of these objects.

-Can model the games based on Wario ware which has a collection of interesting and addictive minigames.

1. the key would be to break up the gameplay in different forms and do lots of activities in a short time
2. helps to make the task very specific to what we want

-The pictures could be fed in from the database based on some 'criteria' that the people would be interested at that moment.. perhaps images from NEWS thats happening at the time ?

-Score on the Facebook profile and publish a story to get more people to play the game.

-the schedule will be comprised of play-testing and development simultaneously.

*-there is a need to design a good metadata format for storing the details of the objects.

More ideas and questions about Image Processing

Meeting Notes

---------------------

What about gigapan pictures?

- Would divide these images into smaller images, but not drop below a certain resolution (say, 800 x 600 for example)
- Game could be that each person tags sections of a large image.  Once they tag an image, they "collect" that image.  The collected images fill in the original large picture.  The person's end goal could be to guess what the large image is (or tag the large image with a general term like "landscape" or a specific name like "San Francisco")
- Game could have two modes and at the beginning the players choose to be either a Tagger or a Finder.  The Taggers draw squares around the objects they tag in the image.  The Finders try to find the object that has been tagged (all tagged squares are flipped over or hidden and the Finder must click on the square they think is the appropriate object to show what was underneath).

When tagging close-up images of people, do we want players to tag facial features like noses, eyes, and ears?

- If they draw a square around it, we can pull out the nose and show it in a search engine search
- We can extract out the cropped parts and show them to someone else for verification

-Use the fade-away memory game as confirmation to tags created in another game.

-Categorization of the image into - name, place, animal, thing

-How accurate do we want the tags to be?  If we use these tags in a search engine, we will be perpetuating the circulation of misinformation.

-Another mini-game could be to show players an image and the players must determine if a human is in the image or not.

-Could try converting colored images into black and white images, players then tag the objects with their appropriate colors (for example, a black and white image of the Flintstones -> players tag Fred's shirt as orange).

-a thought that crossed: the size of the objects in the real world has an impact on how the people perceive it in an image. splitting an image should be based on this.

Advisor meeting notes - Image processing game ideas

Here are some of the ideas from John and Shirley, along with some inputs from our side

All the following ideas pertain to the Image recognition game:-

1. how about recognizing the objects based on a given category?

2. how about associating objects together in some way?

3. how about a game of memory?

        -show the picture, give some time for the people to see the image

        -cover the image now

        -ask the player to point to the place he thought that the object would be

4. how about using the silhouettes of the objects in the images in some way

5. how about the 6 difference game? two images with slight difference between them?

6. how about collaborating and creating new pictures from the objects found ?

7. how about coming up with a game based on the colour of objects? biggest object coloured red? find the objects based on their colour..

8. how about a Mystery game? sherlock holmes, clue based ? finding objects in the image?

9. how about associating the object with a piece of music? or a musical clue to guess the object?

some more tips and pitfalls:-

----------------------------------------

*-since game is seconday and the objective of problem solving is primary, is there anything other game that can be thought of. ofcourse, this can be an interesting and fun activity..

perhaps some place that people would not expect it to be

-make sure that there is confirmation/verification of the idea of the game

-we also figure out where in the image, the object would be placed

-know your audience

-think if everyone would tag the same way?

-can you use the cave? or the huge ball (whatever it is ) ?

-a game based on the advanced technology that lets computers determine where the people are seeing in the image.

-use filters to get down to what you want.

Project Idea Discussion - Image Processing

Team Meeting:

We discussed in length about the possibilities with the image processing. As mentioned in the client meeting, we wanted to get as many attributes as possible from the image.

So what we came up with was this:

1. A closed loop image subdivision algorithm based on tagging objects in images

Step 1: 

Lets assume we have a picture. any general picture. we decide to play a game of 20 questions. the player can identify and keep in his mind *any* object in the image.

Since 20 questions works on binary subdivision of possibilities, we are quickly able to reduce the item to what the player is thinking of:

1. this can be either done based on the kind of object itself. OR

2. it can be done by dividing the image into parts and asking the person if the object in his mind is in that part of the image.

Step 2: 

we are either going to guess the object in the players mind ( if we already have what the player sees in our database of metatags about this picture ) or we are going to ask the player to tag the object. once the player tags the object, we have a richer database to guess the subsequent player choices of objects.

we repeat Steps 1 and 2 in order for several players for the same image, thus resulting in a closed loop system that constantly betters itself by learning about the image from human players.

this is just a simplistic perspective and does not deal with the exact nature of game design. i am certain this can be made more exciting by using different lenses of game design. only the idea is being conveyed here. for example we could have an image like this tagged as shown.

there are so many objects that the brain sees that might take years of image recognition research to catch up to.

now objects are just nouns..

we could deal with actions that an object is doing.. verbs.. 

so we can have a reading lady in this image.. or static bike..  or walking man.

or perhaps adjectives like red light.. green light .. red bike.

so by taking a simple approach to this complex problem, we are generating huge amounts of meta data that can be highly relevant and useful for image search.

we could infact focus on one set of data.. like satellite imagery.. or something on that line.

as images become more dense ( more objects per inch ), this method of tagging becomes significant.. in fact the more complex an image is, the more fun the game is to play.

further we did consider the possibility of re-orienting an object in image to match a given plane.. so that we knew how the picture was w.r.t a normal plane.. but this is not a part of the core idea stated above.

Meeting Notes 2

Meeting with the Client:

- We are doing well -> we're on the right track with brainstorming.
- Interested in metatagging and assigning attributes to objects (in both images and sounds)
- In terms of defining the orientation of objects in pictures can go beyond just faces -> it can be used for architecture, cars, and other everyday objects to inform an image recognition software.

~ We could have a searchable database of images or videos; after teaching the software, we could then call up all instances of an object (like a telephone).
~ Identification of objects is key
~ Could narrow database to surveillance footage and have people identify what (who) is in it.

- In terms of tagging emotions/feelings in sounds, we could potentially tag the emotion in a voice clip.
- Not as interested in traffic flow problems, but they could have some potential -> just need to find a better optimization problem if this is the path we want to explore.
- We can define classes of objects -> can the player outline the object and then we extract the object?
- Glyph recognition -> we could then identify objects and replace them in an image with something else, or remove them entirely

~ Divide the image up into a grid - each player gets only a small piece

- The traveling salesman problem is a high-risk path to take, but with a potentially huge payoff

To Do:
- Deliverable: Write up in detail all the brainstorming and explain why we chose the path we chose.
- Categorize the ideas we've had so far

~ Look further in depth at some of the ideas we've had relating to image processing
~ Research more potential problems, potential games, etc...

Idea for the Project session 2

1. Identifying the classes of objects and their number in an image.

Given an image database this solutions attempts to find the objects that are present in the image, as well as the number of them present.

as humans we are good at recognising images of people or partial images. as in we can see a half cut table or a human who is facing backwards.

these seem to be things that computers would find very difficult to pattern recognize. 

hence if we give the players an image and ask them to recognize what they see in the image.. come up with a game mechanic that makes this fun, we will be generating classification data that can be used to further tag the images.

2. Tagging a feeling for a song or a radio.

we identify songs with the feelings taht they bring to us. however this is not the classification that we see on music labels.

by asking the player to classify the music he is hearing into one of the categories or a category of his own, we can have a better selection for music.

the categories can be based on feelings alone. the songs can be fed in live from the various radio stations across the globe.

this will create a useful database of information.. 

further if a music band wants to get a feedback for a song that it has composed, in terms of the feeling it intends to evoke, it could be made a part of this game.

they can get instant feedbacks on how they feel.

all this needs is an addictive game that is designed around the concept of music classification. people just hear songs and play the game.. perhaps there may not be a verbal indication of how the song feels but a visually generated world into which player transcends into.. .. .. .. 

3. Separation of noise and actual information.. voice, background vehicle sound. 

we know that dropping some item in the background when we are talking to someone does not make us turn around unless that item is large enough.. or its a person. we instantly know what is important. however a computer finds it difficult to classify what is noise and what is not. so given a random sound track it could be achallenge for a person to identify how many people are there or tag the different sounds that he can hear in the track. in essence he is eliminating the noise and is tagging only what is essential.

for example, if its a clip of a car moving on the road.. the player will rightly identify it as the car in the background.. and perhaps the sound of brakes.

humans build a context as they hear a track, but computers dont.. humans are context sensitive,hence they can analyse a given sound track in greater deths.

on my way back home i met a friend from CMU who is doing his PhD in image processing. as we talked, one of the things he mentioned caught my attention.

4. Orientation of an object in an Image

it is non-trivial to find the orientation of the image in an object. however as humans we are gifted with the ability to extrapolate the information that is not present in the image. like if there is a surveillance camera shot of a person who is walking in the subway, obviously he would not be facing the camera always. as humans we can figure out that it is the same guy no matter what is orientation is upto a certain point. but it becomes a complicated problem for a computer to solve. so determining the orientation of objects in images could be a challenging problem that can be crowdsourced. given two images with different orientations of the same object, its just a matter of few seconds for a human to recognize the object, but a mammoth task for the image recognition algorithm. this also lends itself as a good game to the players. so proceeding in this lines might be potentially a good idea. 

other ideas that we discussed:

either composition or orchestration of music
  - could be used as a teaching tool for children (educational)
  - Musical associations - colors, images

Idea for the Project session 1

1. Simulation of two countries, awareness of conflict for the player. result: a better citizen in the real world.

Lets model the countries each with input parameter R. This parameter determines the happenings in the world for a person.

R is the resource that is required by both the countries. Each person can vote to share a percentage (beta) of the resource with the other country. 0<=beta<=1. the world changes based on this vote of the person.

W = beta*R. 

We have a happiness meter for person P, which is again a weighted score of how good the overall world is currently as well as how good the person is locally.

H = x * localGood + y*GlobalGood.

localGood is the house that he might have build or the work that he might have done based on the resource R whose share he has got. while globalgood is the sum of happiness of all the people in the world. x and y are proportions that are determined as the game is played. the person's score is determined by how long he was at happiness level H for a time t.. 

Happiness at time t = Sigma ( Hi * ti ).

where Hi is the happiness at time ti.

The objective of the game is to score maximum happiness points. This game teaches conflict mediation for a person. It gives the person a holistic view of the world and how it operates. as the game progresses or as we introduce multiple parameters, we can see higher levels of emergent gameplay.

2. Optimal arrangement of roads for the traffic flow.

consider the following figure

   C

C X C

   C

here X is the player driving his car and C are the other cars that are front, rear, left and right of him. his goal is simple.

1. follow the car in front of him as long as its a straight path

2. avoid collision with cars around him

3. deviate from the path if need be. i.e. if he has to take a left or right turn.

When we see the overall traffic flow, we see the following figure.

 

C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   

   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   

C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   

   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   

C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   

   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   

C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   

   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   

C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   

   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   C   

here each car is just following the simple rule 1 and 2. however we see that the rows of cars or traffic is regulating itself without any central point of focus.

given a route, we can analyse the flow of traffic in the street. we can analyse the bottle necks and rearrange them to see how different the traffic flow would be.

w.r.t a person, he is just playing a game where he sees 4 cars. but on the whole we see a huge difference to the traffic flow system.

3. The Travelling Salesman Problem

TSP is arguably one of the most famous algorithms and the most required one that is known not to have an exact solution in polynomial time. Given a set of points, human eye is very good at determining the visually closest neighbours. we could use this property to solve the TSP. if a large enough problem is broken into chunks and distributed among the people, they would find it interesting to solve.. as demonstrated by 

http://www.tsp.gatech.edu/games/tspOnePlayer.html

it would be worth looking for an idea that extends this principles to a vast crowd of people, entertainingly solving the problem.

4. Real parameters

when a user browses the network we become aware of several of his details like the ip address, locale, country, etc. how about using the game as a wrapper to find the details of these parameters. this is some kind of a meta information.

other ideas we talked about were, though not in elaboration

tom tom gps - they calculate the actual speed of a person by using the data from other gps's near by. so these are more reliable than the other gps in the market.

an interesting problem would be to get rid of viruses ( identifying virus signatures? ) by playing the game.

A Few Ideas

Here are a couple of ideas I came up with over the weekend. While these may not be what we are looking for, perhaps they will spur new ideas for everyone else.

The first is a sort of foreign policy model that explores how people would choose to deal with other nations. The game would take place in an imaginary land (think Middle Earth) that is broken up into different regions/nations. The players wouldn't know this, but the different nations' policies in this land would be initially modeled after real policies of different countries. As play progresses, players can modify their nation's policies (perhaps we could find a way to average out the 'votes' for changes so the policies reflect the most popular change). In this way, the game defines itself as people play - eventually the nations of the land would no longer represent the original models at all. It could be used to examine how different foreign policies work and how others fail.

The next idea would be a tool used to teach computers (maybe). Since the human brain is so good at visual calculations and predictions, we could make a game where people predict where a moving object will be in 5 or 10 seconds in the future. The computer could store these movement scenarios as experiences, which could later be used in collision avoidance for vehicles. A computer in a car could identify the movement of different objects and refer to these experiences to predict where the object will be, hopefully helping to prevent collisions.

This next link is a game that is sort of the reverse of the ESP game. In this game, the player is presented a series of images and he must guess the search keyword that would return those images. It's a different spin on the same sort of game.
http://grant.robinson.name/projects/guess-the-google/

I was also looking up National Archive transcriptions, to try to find more information about whether it is even a relevant problem when I found this site. It is in the British National Archives website and it is a series of pages that lead you through a tutorial in how to transcribe old documents. This link leads to the 'Practice' page, but once on that page the links on the left are for the 'tutorial' sections. I thought it was interesting and just wanted to share it with everyone.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/latinpalaeography/practice-documents.htm

Another idea I had touches on image recognition. People are good at identifying a representation of something as the thing itself (i.e. a stick figure is a person). We could make a game where people identify the object represented in the picture. This could be used to teach computers what rough drawings represent. Here's a link to a 'Similar Search' image search engine that allows you to draw what you want to search and it finds it (for example, try drawing a t-shirt and hit search). It's pretty amazing - I found this website last year when it was still in beta form. Looks like it's live now. It's fun to play with and it's pretty amazing all the stuff it can do!
http://www.gazopa.com/

Prometheus

We took naming our team seriously. Afterall, this is what we would be known by for the rest of the semester and the foreseeable future.

We brainstormed for hours together in futility.  After much thought, in fact a lot of thought about naming our team, we came up with the name Prometheus.It sounded like a name all of us agreed upon. We playtested the name on all the other humans in the room and they seemed to like it. We went further and consulted with a mythology graduate about prometheus and she liked it too.  As a group of three teams, we are getting along well and the whole room seems like a bull-pen where we can have fun and learn together.

We are working independantly on finding the problem. in a sense we have crowdsourced the problem of finding a problem within our team. the goal is:

1. to find an existing crowdsourcing problem that is known in computing. OR

2. to find a crowdsourceble problem in the real world and map it on to a computable problem.

we have planned to deal with designing a game around this problem later.

all of us will update the blog with our research and thoughts in the coming two days. we will brainstorm further on monday.

Who’s doing crowdsourcing?

General Idea Generation & Solving

• AddictLab - creative think tank
• Brain Reactions - post questions and get ideas/feedback on them
• Fellowforce - innovation challenge board covering many disciplines
• iBridge Network - platform for university innovation
• IdeaConnection - idea marketplace and problem solving
• Idea Crossing - organize innovation quests
• IdeaMagnet - powering idea generation
• Ideawicket - open innovation portal
• Innovation Exchange - open innovation market place
• WhyNot - idea exchange

Science & Research

• Innocentive - crowdsourcing scientific solutions to corporate problems
• Science Commons - generic license agreements
• TekScout - crowdsourcing R&D solutions
• YourEncore - crowd of retired veteran scientists and engineers

Freelance work

• elance - freelance marketplace
• Guru - freelance community
• Ki Work - sourcing online work
• odesk - global marketplace for remote work

Micro-tasks

• Amazon Mechanical Turk - micro-task crowdsourcing
• HumanGrid - small online tasks solving

Technology

• Ninesigma - technology problem solving
• TopCoder - programming competitions
• Yet2.com – crowdsourcing technology solutions to problems

Product Design

• CrowdSpirit - crowdsourcing the design of innovative products

Creative/Graphic Design

• 99 Designs – design crowdsource contests
• CrowdSpring – network of graphic designers
• Genius Rocket – crowdsourcing creative community
• Inkd - market for print design

Entrepreneurs & Inventors

• IdeaBlob - monthly contest for entrepreneurial ideas
• Incuby - online community for inventors

Consumer Ideas & Feedback

• CrowdSound – ideas from customers/users
• Idea Bounty - a social think tank

Health & Medical

• Eureke medical - medical open innovation platform

Enterprise Crowdsourcing/Open Innovation Sites

• Betavine - Vodafone’s mobile app community
• BMW Customer Innovation Lab - in german
• BT - British Telecom’s Innovation Initiative
• Dell IdeaStorm - external idea sourcing
• Fluevog - open shoe design
• GameChanger - Shell’s coporate crowdsourcing
• IBM InnovationJam - internally focused idea generation project
• IBM ThinkPlace - idea generation and collaboration
• Intel Cool Software - Intel’s sensing platform
• Jones Soda - crowdsources flavours and pictures for their labels
• Kraft - innovate with Kraft
• LEGO Factory - LEGO co-creation tool
• My Starbucks Idea - shaping the future of Starbucks
• Nesta - UK National Endowment of Science, Technology and the Arts
• P&G Open Innovation Challenge - external idea sourcing in Britain
• Unilever - Ideas4Unilever - corporate venturing
• Vocalpoint - Pgamp;G’s network for women

Crowdsourcing Contests

• City of Austin - feedback on City of Austin’s website
• Electrolux Design Lab - annual design competition for students
• The Guardian - Crowdsourcing analysis of MPs expenses
• Muji - improving and suggesting new designs
• National Geographic - crowdsourced Earth-saving ideas
• Nespresso - design contest for coffee machines
• Peugeot - Peugeot’s design contest
• Picnic Green Challenge - ideas to save the planet
• Smith Chips - crowdsourced flavour selection
• Staples Invention Quest - idea contest
• Xprize - incentivized crowdsourcing competition

Consumer/Customer Input

• Get Satisfaction - crowdsourced customer service
• You Suggest - ideas from customers

Clothing, Gifts & Other Products

• Cafepress - shop, create or sell what’s on your mind
• JuJups - personalized gifts
• Naked&Angry - Threadless for ties and wallcoverings
• Polyvore - crowdsourced fashion
• Spreadshirt - shirt community
• Threadless - create and sell your tshirts

Funding

• Artistshare – fans funding new artists
• A Swarm of Angels - crowdfunding a film
• Kickstarter - fund ideas and endeavours
• Kiva – crowdfunded micro-loans to 3rd world entrepreneurs
• My Bandstock - fan funded investment in bands
• Sellaband – crowdfunded bands

Miscellaneous

• Better than the Van – crowdsourced community connecting bands to places to stay
• Crowd Flower – crowdsourcing for human-required tasks
• Elastic Lab - film production
• Groupon - crowdsourced group discounts
• Help me Investigate - a place to collaborate with others to investigate things
• Inkling Markets - use wisdom of the crowd for forecasting
• iStockPhoto - user-generated photos
• Healogica – crowdsourcing clinical trials
• Help me Investigate - a place to collaborate with others to investigate things
• Hollr - crowdsourcing cool stuff finding
• Quirky - production of crowdsourced ideas
• Stumble Upon - crowdsourced website discovery engine
• uTest - user experience testing
• Wikipedia - peer produced encyclopedia

From http://www.chaordix.com/crowdsourcing-in-action

Meetings and Name Selection

Today we had meet with clients at Lockheed.

Of the many points noted, the following two seem to summarize our understanding better:

1. The survey should be anonymous. in other words, the player should just play the game while generating solutions.. 

2. look into the aspects what computers cant do and what humans can do better.

We will put the survey idea in the back seat and try fiddling with new ideas. 

Our objective henceforth would be to find problems that are challenging enough and specific enough to apply our solution.

We met with John and Shirley and did get a lot of new perspectives

-interpretation of unintelligible ( colloquial ) text

-missing the soul ideas:

• -understanding the emotion of a person with the sentence ( like in email )
• -script writer -> director = challenge of understanding what the scriptwriter meant
• -personal interpretation - varies between individuals

-first impressions of people -> what are the things you can figure out on seeing a persons image? - the metadata

   as humans we can know a lot about a person on seeing his/her image, but what about a computer?

-rating creativity

-cheating - computers cant cheat. they just do the best of what they know..

-Lie - computers cant lie about the information they have. every query either gives the right answer or no answer. but why would we want them to lie?

-judging a person

-no qualities of compassion, love and emotions for a computer

-musically jamming with an instrument

tip: think about more than one idea at a time. it helps to channelize your thoughts instead of curtailing it.

use flash modules for project development. thy reduce turnaround time for code.

Then we brainstormed the name of our team seriously for 3 hours. 

we wanted a 1 word short name, that sounded cool, was unique and had a meaning.

after sifting through latin, macedonian, estonian, german and other translations as well as english, we ended up with the following four

Nebula - a galaxy of stars, and its cool

Emersyn - a combo of emergent gameplay and synergy

Sinergy - Synergy misspelled so that its unique

Hive - representing a swarm of bees that collectively solve a problem

we are probably going to pick Sinergy tomorrow. any name suggestions are welcome.

Brainstorming session 4

19 January 2010

Dynamic programming and optimisation

-we realized that several problems of optimization directly lend themselves into crowdsourcing problems.

Our categorization of all the crowdsourced problems into three categories yesterday, gave us new insights. We realized that all huge problems of category one and three, could be solved by collecting simple data from people. this data is perhaps so simple, that it seems trivial for an average human. we co-related this newly acquired knowledge to the concept of surveys. surveys were boring to take up. people resist taking surveys. so the question that popped into all of our minds was

"What if we can make 'surveying' fun?" .. this sparked a series of discussions. Surveys have all the characteristics needed for a 'wise crowd'

1. Privately held information by the player.

2. Independance of decision making.

3. Decentralization of decision making.

Aggregating these surveys is a great way to solve a big problem at hand. 

We decided to think of non-traditional ways to make the survey taking interesting. 

-a game that wraps a survey into a fun-filled experience-

Survey-like game notes 

Want to build a framework that puts surveys into game form

What do surveys have in common:

• Questions and answers
• Can be unbiased/objective but can also allow survey takers to enter text
• Can create different types of games for different types of surveys
• Need sufficient time to read the question and interpret
• Can build in crosschecks for coherence
• Could be used as a scoring mechanism
• If people don't answer consistently they can lose points and the surveyor knows to throw out that survey
• Must be FUN
• Replayable
• Can show the distance from the end as a map (like Super Mario World)

 

Ideas/Models for games:

• Super Mario World
• Pacman (Question can be revealed one word at a time with each dot eaten)
• Music Note/Composition (a song is composed based on your answers to the questions)
• Create lots of games and the surveying company can choose what game to use for each question or for their entire survey
• Bow and arrow game (question is revealed by drawing the bow, then aim at the appropriate answer)
• Drawing game (drag the mouse to the answer you want, but there is an object following the mouse that you must get to the answer safely or in one piece – like a missile or a ball or a puppy)
• Bowling game (question revealed on the alleyway as the ball rolls over it)
• Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Robots
• Boxing game
• Tetris
• Jellyfishing (like SpongeBobSquarePants) -> have a net and must catch jellyfish
• Blockbreaker (question is hiding throughout the level so you must eliminate all the blocks to see the question, the game then pauses long enough for you to choose an answer, then you move on to the next level)
• Question appears one word at a time as the character jumps/bounces

 

In our game:

1. Each answer path must be equally fun and equally challenging
2. We should make sure the player has read the question by making it a necessary action to complete the game
3. There should be no time limits, so people aren't pressured into answer quickly rather than honestly
4. There should be an option to confirm or change the answer (like a little pop-up at the end of every level where you can choose to retry the level or move on to the next level)

Alternately:

1. We could introduce the challenge only in obtaining the question.
2. On obtaining a question, the player is presented with an answer.
3. Once he answers, we proceed to the next challenge of getting the next question.
4. So the player has a motivation to complete the survey.
5. Having repeat questions that check the integrity of the survey is a great option to ensure the fairness. 
6. Getting repeat questions can be associated with a goody or reward in the game.

We discussed several ideas like the player disclosing the question as he plays the game. this is less that 30 seconds that is.. we would ensure that the player would read the question before answering it.

In summary, we continually motivate our player to answer successive questions fairly. Using this survey like thing can be used to solve several crowdsourcing problems that weigh every person's response. example: price prediction ( stock? ), movie success prediction, fuel consumption and perhaps hundreds of problems we face in our daily lives.