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.