Visit by Client - Discussed the requirements

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
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Complex problem solving through games

List of Real World Problems
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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 
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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:

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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

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

Questions to ask tomorrow

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-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?

related links:

-http://www.smartfoxserver.com/showcase/

-http://pushbuttonengine.com/docs/

-http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143#

@hoon jong - art template for the 1/4 presentations.. after the design for website has been done..

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!