lm-crowd-project

Game Design Document

2010-03-22T20:15:00.000-07:00

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

2010-02-25T13:05:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-25T12:13:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-17T07:47:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-03T17:30:00.000-08:00

-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.

the key would be to break up the gameplay in different forms and do lots of activities in a short time
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.

Advisor meeting notes - Image processing game ideas

2010-01-28T15:05:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-27T20:52:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-27T20:14:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-26T17:48:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-25T18:08:00.000-08:00

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 X 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

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

2010-01-25T06:56:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-22T14:06:00.001-08:00

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?

2010-01-22T13:28:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-20T17:21:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-19T17:42:00.001-08:00

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:

Each answer path must be equally fun and equally challenging
We should make sure the player has read the question by making it a necessary action to complete the game
There should be no time limits, so people aren't pressured into answer quickly rather than honestly
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:

We could introduce the challenge only in obtaining the question.
On obtaining a question, the player is presented with an answer.
Once he answers, we proceed to the next challenge of getting the next question.
So the player has a motivation to complete the survey.
Having repeat questions that check the integrity of the survey is a great option to ensure the fairness.
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.

Brainstorming session 3

2010-01-18T17:29:00.001-08:00

18 January 2010

More Brainstorming Notes

New idea: Categorization Game – players are shown a picture of an object and must indicate "Where does it belong" either by typing in the answer or by clicking on a region of the map

- What attributes might a person be able to discern from a picture of an object?

o Identification (what is it)

o Color

o Size (relative)

o Used for?

o Where is it used?

o Cost

o Weight

o What is it made of?

o Shape

Categories of Problems (based on Crowdsourcing article)

- Monetization

o Pabst Brewing Company
o MoveOn.org

- Separate problem into chunks

o   uTest
o   Guardian newspaper
o   Design Bay
o   Texas border security

- Finding an algorithm/Prediction

o Netflix
o Gold Mine

- Idea Generation

o FCC Broadband distribution
o Cisco systems

- Classification

o   ESP
o   Family Search
o   Galaxy Zoo
o   Emporis
o   reCaptcha
o   Stardust@Home

- Use people to solve big problem

o   Amazon's Mechanical Turk
o   InnoCentive
o   Philoptima
o   Innovation Exchange

- Adding Information

o   Katrina (lost people index)
o   Gold Mine
o   Wikipedia
o   OpenStreetMap

Three general/overarching categories of problems:

1)     Every person's solution matters in order to complete the solution
2)     Gather the best/optimal solution
3)     Everyone works toward one solution / get one solution from the entire crowd

Reclassifying all the above problems based on the three generic classes:

1) Every person's solution matters in order to complete the solution

a.     Guardian
b.     Texas Border
c.     Wikipedia
d.     Katrina
e.     Amazon's Mech Turk
f.      ESP
g.     Galaxy Zoo
h.     Emporis
i.      reCaptcha
j.      Stardust@home
k.     Foldit

2) Gather the best/optimal solution

a.     uTest
b.     Design Bay
c.     FCC
d.     CISCO

3) Everyone works towards one solution/gets one solution from the entire crowd

a. Netflix
b. Surveying

Seven more specific ways of using people to:

1) Build a knowledge base / contribute information (like Wikipedia)
2) Choose and solve a problem from a pool of problems (like the Mechanical Turk)
3) Contribute financially
4) Test
5) Solve a problem broken into chunks
6) Contribute design / ideas / algorithms
7) Classify / label

Contribute financially

- Game sponsored by an organization willing to donate money to charities based on game scores
- Donates to a different charity each day
- For each question answered correctly, a small amount of money ($0.01 for example) will be donated (similar to the rice game, where 10 grains of rice are donated for each question)
- Could be themed to the specific charity or cause each day to help people feel the importance

Testing

- Test translation software by seeing the before-processed text and after-processed text; the player indicates whether the translation is accurate or not (could also be applied to transcription software, players hear an audio clip and see the software-generated transcription, then they indicate whether the transcription is correct)
- Test a website for usability
- Test a "low-price" finder
- Test/review cameras by choosing the picture with the higher quality (players are shown two pictures of the same scene, taken by two different cameras; must then indicate which picture is better based on quality)

Breaking into chunks

- Weather prediction
- Astronomical classification (like Galazy Zoo or pulsar survey)
- Something that requires processing of massive amounts of data
- Classifying cultural traits - Determine how aggressive people of a certain culture are
- What kind of Food the people like ? analyse the food habits of people.

- New Idea: Build a survey framework to make survey taking fun, framework could be applied to all kinds of different surveys

Brainstorming session 2

2010-01-15T15:06:00.001-08:00

15 January 2010

Notes

Self-building world

- Human/Human model: person can upload a picture, add some tags, create a model of the object for the world; building assets for the world; users can rate objects; computer gains information about pictures without having to provide the pictures

- Scavenger hunt: given a keyword, upload a picture that matches; the more pictures you upload the more points you get; self-regulated world in that other users can rate the pictures so mismatched pictures don't get points

Image Processing -> Identification/classification -> gender, human, animal, color

Other ideas:

Governing bodies / policy making

Economy model

- Pick a Price! Game

o People guess the price of real-world objects

o Benefactors:

§ Company

· Advertising -> motivation

· Research on fixing a price point

§ Player

· Fun!

· Will learn about the product

· Will learn about the price

· Provides company with "wish list" pricing

o Issues:

§ Can cheat by Googling the actual price

§ How can you determine correct answers?

o Look at the silhouettes of objects instead?

o Rather than asking users to guess the price of the object, ask how much they think another person (an anonymous partner perhaps) will pay for the object

§ Use a range ($0 - $10, $10 - $20, etc)

§ Or have players guess what the overall average guess is -> regulated by players, not by real-world prices

· Still valuable to companies in regards to research on perceived value

Team will further their thinking about the price game.

Brainstorming session 1

2010-01-14T15:33:00.000-08:00

14 January 2010

Brainstorming notes

Ideas/Concepts/Real world problems:

1) Image processing

2) Facial recognition -> country/region a person is from

3) Aesthetic design problems

4) Fashion coordinator

5) Art -> music, video, illustration

6) Large (huge) image processing, distributing chunks

7) Map building

8) Catastrophe -> earthquake, flood, meteor

9) Emergency response

10) Speech recognition

11) Translation

12) Noise recognition/identification and cancellation

13) Text processing

14) Cryptography

15) Genealogy

16) Software testing

17) Imparting knowledge -> quiz form

18) Data mining

19) News aggregation

20) Wiki/knowledge base

21) Enhancing search engines

22) Movie rating system / other rating system

23) Combinatorics

24) Dietary suggestions

25) Addiction

26) Relationships

27) Religious conflicts

28) Environmental issues -> pollution, wildlife management, water shortages

29) Agricultural issues

30) Starvation

31) Discrimination -> race, gender, sexual orientation

32) Identity theft

33) Collision avoidance of air traffic

34) STEM education

35) Storytelling

36) Machine learning

37) Telling humans and computers apart -> Turing test

EMERGENCY RESPONSE

Types of emergencies: Vehicular accidents, Medical, Natural Disaster, Terrorist attack, Security

- Find the shortest path locally – real time vs. static

o Use a quiz – Ask people what the fastest path is from point A to point B

o Race – Use real maps and have people race from point A to point B; they will most likely use the shortest path

- What do humans know about a local map that computers don't/can't know?

o Quality of restaurants (ratings)

o Best routes

o Safety level of a route (safety rating of a road)

o Scenic routes (beauty rating of a drive)

o Places of interest

o Essentially, the human preference as opposed to statistics

SPEECH RECOGNITION

- Transcription

o Speed typing game

§ Input from people can also be made into a game

· Must be able to split the words in an audio track

o Use pauses in speech to determine separation of words/sentences

o Use metronome type mechanism, like Rock Band, and recordings are done to a beat or a musical rhythm

§ Can verify accuracy by checking answers against many people's answers

§ Input from the National Archives: Is there a need to transcribe old interviews?

· Give the player the freedom to transcribe as much or as little as he wants

· Use the time-stamps for the transcribed section to compare against other transcriptions (to be used for verification purposes)

· Or only give people one word at a time, randomly from different interviews; a player will not hear one full interview

o The faster he can type the transcription, the faster he gets a new word, the faster he can score points

o Eventually will complete one whole transcription

- Sound tags/Identification of human vs. other noise

- Identification of gender

- Identification of multiple people -> distinguishing that a different person is talking

- Teaching tool -> Foreign pronunciation

o Can be used to check pronunciation; Person A uploads a small sample of his speech, Person B listens to the speech and attempts to transcribe what was said, if Person B has difficulties understanding Person A then Person A knows his pronunciation is poor; Person A can then search for and listen to sound clips of a specific word for the correct pronunciation

o Can also practice listening to/understanding/mimicking different accents

o Would build a foreign accent database that would teach the computer how to recognize accents

DESIGN/AESTHETICS

- Composition

- Products (bottle shapes)

- Rating beauty of an image for Google image searches

- Useful for marketing

- Cars

- Building a design from small pieces

o Upload design and get rated by other people

o Gain more complex pieces to build with

o Person will gain feedback on his work; can learn what people like

- Toys / Ideas for toys

o Fun

o Safe

o LEGOs?

- Clothing

o Play dress-up

o Fashion

§ Design baby clothing

o Hair

§ Fix profile pictures with new hair styles

- Architecture /spaces

o Optimize workplace environments for best work

o Aesthetic balance leading to most efficient use of the space

o Optimize the space by trying different sized furniture

FOR RESEARCH:

National Archive

Can computers recognize/pull words from recordings? Does this software already exist?

Translation software/solutions – current technology

Potential game mechanism:

Use a lottery -> the more points people score the more chance they have of winning a lottery

Revolve around human preference that makes sense to other humans ( like beauty, safety, etc )

A visually attractive game is pleasing and can be engaging to the player.

The elements of human:

eyes, ears, a huge database ( experience ).

Reading about games with a purpose

2010-01-13T16:52:00.000-08:00

Looks like something we would want to read while in the process of
designing our game:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/GWAP_CACM.pdf Also check out
http://fold.it/portal which is one of the better games with a purpose
out there

Visit by Client - Discussed the requirements

2010-01-13T16:16:00.000-08:00

We met with our clients and discussed what they wanted. Looks like we were on the same page.
Here are the points we touched upon today.

Distributed Human Computing
========================
Complex problem solving through games

List of Real World Problems
======================
1.Image search
Cityscape - shapefile
google images
hubble space telescope
chunks of a huge image
high fidelity google earth image
2.Stock market trends
3.News aggregation/dissemination/classification
4.Traffic Patterns
5.Disease Control/Prevention
6.Genome analysis
7.SETI stuff
8.Music Composition Collaboration / Audio processing
9.Energy Usage - Cars, Electricity, Gas
10.STEM
11. Collaborative Film Making
12. Emergent Game Making
13. Story in a game - like improv - collaborative story generation
14. Data Overload
15. Geo-Location based
16. Fire Escape - Best exit route
17. Addressing drug problem
18. Classification/Cataloging of books
19. Gaining information about people and their nature.
20. Procedural programming

Two Views
==========
1. Split The problem into chunks and distribute
2. Offer the whole problem for solving - assume at least one player hits on a solution.

Ways to use the human brain:
1. Eyes
2. Ears
3. Intuition
4. Dreams

We need incentives/rewards to bring people back, to make them want to continue playing.

Action Items:

==========

Each member of the team will bring 15 real world problems to the table. so as a team we are going to brainstorm the possibilities of 60+ real world problems. we shall try to narrow our problem space to the ones that we feel have a realistic feel, at the same time being challenging & fun to solve.

Jan 12 - Meeting Notes

2010-01-13T16:08:00.000-08:00

We discussed about a bunch of probable questions that we might have for our client.

Questions to ask tomorrow

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

-What are they thinking about the project?

-Do you need the game design document?

-How far do you consider the project to be complete?

-One good game or a bunch of experimental prototypes?

-How many people required for the game to be playtested? ( 1000,10000 or more? )

-Any particular detail regarding the problem to be solved by crowdsourcing?

-Demography of the people?

-2D art in flash?

-Any preferences/suggestions for the platform?

11 January 2010 - Meeting Notes

2010-01-13T16:04:00.000-08:00

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)