11 January 2010 - Meeting Notes

We exchanged ideas about what we thought this project was about.

Potential game ideas:

• Classification and aggregation of news
• Can be separate problems (i.e. classification-only game, or aggregation-only game)
• Would use croudsourcing for ordering the information, not the creation of information
• Image-based searching
• People provide the information about image content rather than computer algorithms
• Could be presented as a quiz or puzzle game
• Real-time gameplay
• Using people as game boards. thinking in terms of gameboard being alive, since we have many many players
• Asynchronous gameplay
• Person A’s game influences Person B’s game (either through AI adjustments or environmental factors or some other method)
• Need to have incentives to bring people back (i.e. Farmville -> harvesting crops)
• YouTube video labeler

Research:

• Good tutorial - Desktop Defenders (Facebook game)
• News crowdsourcing - Wikipedia, Topicfire.com, Digg.com
• Flash - Push button game engine
• Play Spacecube game on Facebook (go to Application Search -> Spacecubes)
• Talk to Hoon Jong for a tutorial on how to play
• Kirby in Candyland - easily scalable and highly interactive
• 20 Questions game
• Behavioral control and other social experiments
• Look into Adobe Flex for our project website
• Get in touch with Oscar about developing and publishing Facebook games

Project goals:

• Use a social platform to tap into all sorts of intelligence
• Have a minimum of 10,000 people playing by the end of the semester
• Make a game that is useful to the real world
• Use humans as part of the computation – get the human element
• Gather information about users (in the form of a database that has already been created or some other form)

Action Items:

• Take video throughout the semester of various stages of development so we don’t have to crunch it all in at the very end
• Either borrow an ETC camera or buy an SD card and use Danielle’s video camera
• Publish temporary game on Facebook early (by sometime next week) so we can get past the month-long approval period
• Need to start playtesting as soon as possible!