State-of-the-Art: Design of the Semantics Acquisition Games - Semantic Acquisition Games: Harnessing Manpower for Creating Semantics - page 101

A significant provision of games with social experience aesthetics is that they
are relatively content-independent and are therefore able to sustain the player
attention, because players “entertain each other”.
2. Competition among players [ 2 , 8 , 9 , 28 ]. The competition is traditionally present
inmany games. For SAGs, we recognize two basic concepts: a match between two
(or more) players (in which one or more players are victorious) and a ladder —
a list in which players are sorted according to their scores. While match-based
game requires simultaneous participation of multiple players (a danger of cold-
start problems), the ladder can be used even when a game session (instance) is
occupied by only one player. On the other hand, the ladder-based game bears
a risk that many players will loose interest in it because it takes too much effort
for the player to reach a position he desires, whereas in the match-based game,
the feeling of victory materializes each game.
3. Self-challenge overcoming a player's own previous achievement, joy of reaching
a goal [ 17 , 23 ]. Particularly common for today's SAGs are verbal and visual chal-
lenges (involving texts and images). Overcoming these puzzles emulates similar
feeling like crossword solving.
4. Discovery—a joy of exploring the game world, e.g. listening to new music in
music annotation SAG [ 1 , 12 ].
Besides game aesthetics classification, we can look at the player's motivation from
the crowdsourcing perspective. Various worker incentives are described by literature
as usable for crowdsourcing (we list them below). A subset of them is also applicable
to SAGs.
1. money (i.e. a monetary or material reward—not applicable to SAGs),
2. goodwill (the participant is satisfied with the good feeling he has upon finishing
the work—applicable to SAGs),
3. alignment with personal goals (solving the crowdsourcing task also helps the
participant himself—applicable to SAGs, yet not used),
4. fun (a natural part of SAG concept, i.e. the players are attracted by pleasures
provided by the game),
5. socialization (corresponds social experience aesthetics found in SAGs) and,
6. reputation and gamification (introduction of game aspects and mechanics like
leaderboards and badges into an originally non-game working environment—
partially covered in SAGs).
The incentives 4, 5 and 6 are somewhat aligned to the previous aesthetics classifica-
tion. The incentive 1 (money) is relevant to crowdsourcing in general, but exclusive
with the SAG principles (which a priori refuse to motivate players by money). The
second (goodwill) varies from player to player. The third must be engineered as
a part of SAG's design and is currently not used in any existing SAG approach
(except our own, presented in this work). Overall, we consider this list as problem-
atic to use for SAG classification, yet it might be useful for a SAG designer, to
consider its usage.
One more perspective, from which motivation can be considered is dichotomous:
it can be either external or internal [ 30 ]. The internal motivation sources directly from