State-of-the-Art: Design of the Semantics Acquisition Games - Semantic Acquisition Games: Harnessing Manpower for Creating Semantics - page 92

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What mechanisms and rules govern the SAGs? What are their key properties?

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What are the conditions that each SAG must meet to be successful, or to at least
have a chance to success?

￿ Are there any recurring “design patterns” in SAGs?

￿ What are the good practices in designing the SAGs?

￿ What are the recurring issues of SAGs that hinder theirs success?

￿ How can we suppress/mitigate/rule-out these issues?

￿ Can traditional game design theories and methodologies be useful in designing

SAGs?

These questions guide us in our SAG design research. Using them, we examine
existing SAG approaches. We identify the design aspects common for all SAGs
and issues that SAGs must deal with. We also propose new game mechanisms to
solve some of these issues. In all this, we include our own games, which we use to
demonstrate our designs.

7.1 Missing Methodology

Designing a SAG is not an easy task. The game must provide entertainment and
meanwhile harness the human brainpower in a useful way. There is no known argu-
ment that would exclude a possible existence of a crowdsourcing game solving any
computational problem. However, there is also no universal methodology on how
to methodically transform an arbitrary human intelligence task to a crowdsourc-
ing game. Therefore crowdsourcing games (including SAGs) are currently created
ad-hoc. A very ambitious research goal may be the creation of a SAG design method-
ology, universal or at least suitable for a broader problem-family.

7.1.1 Game Cloning and Casual Playing

Many of the existing SAGs are modified clones of previously existing regular
(and popular) games. The motivation? Every game, including SAGs, must attract
player's attention in a first place. There are some typical (not necessarily computer)
game concepts that are known and widely appreciated by players (secret guessing
games, strategies, role playing games, etc.). If a new SAG's scheme is similar to such
principles (introducing its purpose by some “trick”), the game has fair potential for
appreciation fromplayers. Therefore Vickrey et al. suggested that we should focus on
transforming existing games to crowdsourcing games, to maximize their appeal [ 26 ].
In connection with that Cusack et al. also stress the notion that computer games
should be considered in two groups: classical video games (called also “hardcore”),
which are played intensively by narrow group of players and casual games as their
opposite (played moderately by many players) [ 5 ]. They note that casual games,