State-of-the-Art: Design of the Semantics Acquisition Games - Semantic Acquisition Games: Harnessing Manpower for Creating Semantics - page 100

The capabilities (skills, expertise) of individual players are not the same. Some
of the players are more suitable to solve certain types of tasks than others. It is
therefore suitable to match the players with tasks that best fits their skills. Or to
use the knowledge about player expertise to weight his solutions in the process of
mutual validation (so the skilled players get more influence than bad players and in
the end make the overall SAG output better). The use of “smarter” task assigning in
SAGs was firstly proposed by Chiou and Hsu only recently and was yet not followed
since [ 3 ]. In our work, we conducted our own experiments in applying the knowledge
about player expertise.
Summing up, for task distribution, we recognize following design variants, which
may also be combined to some extent:
1. Random task selection.
2. Greedy task selection.
3. Task value task selection.
4. Data (ontology) driven task selection.
5. Capability-based player selection.
7.2.4 Player Challenges
Much of the SAG success depends on the motivation for playing it. Primarily, the
motivation sources from the entertainment provided by the game: as long as the
game entertains the player, he is willing to contribute his time to perform given
tasks. Secondarily, we also recognize the (possible) motivation from crowdsourcing
point of view: a SAGmay appeal to the players also by its purpose (e.g. a contribution
to a greater good).
From the game perspective, an important part of the motivation is the type of the
pleasure the game offers. Hunicke et al. [ 10 ] identified eight types of aesthetics, by
which the players of computer games may be entertained. For SAGs, we identify
four types (a subset and combination of Hunicke's):
1. Social experience through interaction with other players [ 1 , 25 , 28 ]. The success
of online games stands greatly on their social aspects. Online games usually com-
prise “traditional” features for social interaction (e.g. instant messaging, social
network) making them attractive in a similar way as dedicated social web-based
applications (e.g. Facebook). Yet these social mechanisms are only side-attached
to the actual game mechanism, which are the true benefactors of social interac-
tion. The games truly attract players by unusual rules of interaction, that gen-
erate unusual situations, breaking the “real” social context in which the play-
ers live. Many SAGs also benefit from the social experience factors defined by
game rules. Typically, a recurring human-human interaction-based mechanics
within SAGs is “guessing what other player is thinking” resp. on a “hidden truth”
about the game state from which every player knows only a part. This combined
with limited communication between players, results in intriguing environments.