State-of-the-Art: Design of the Semantics Acquisition Games - Semantic Acquisition Games: Harnessing Manpower for Creating Semantics - page 102

the activity (task solving, game playing). The external motivation is represented by
rewards with loose or no connection to the actual activity—they are awarded simply
when the job is completed. Such rewards are money, but also reputation points,
badges or ranks in ladders. On the other hand, a worker is internally motivated when
he participates in the process even without rewards given to him. The motivation in
this case may source from goodwill, belief, personal gain (from the activity itself) or,
in case of SAGs, fun. In general, the internal motivation is stronger than external—it
retains the worker (player) attracted for longer time, but is also harder to achieve.
7.2.5 Purpose Encapsulation
One of the aspects which characterizes a SAG is how apparent (to the player) is its
purpose. At one side, a SAG may appear as some kind of work performing interface,
not hiding its purpose—the good examples are the image annotation framework
of Seneviratne or co-reference identification games with spartan interfaces merely
containing the features to perform the purposeful tasks [ 2 , 8 , 17 ]. On the other
side, there are SAGs made with substantial efforts to hide (encapsulate) its purpose
into other features of the game. A good example of that is the crowdsourcing game
Plummings where layout optimization of a city completely covers the underlying
FPGA layout optimization task [ 23 ]. If we look at the Krause's OnToGalaxy space
shooter, we can even observe many features and aesthetics not directly connected
to the purpose (e.g. background story, bomb blasts) [ 11 ]. Some SAGs are caught
between these extremes, for example, in Moodswings [ 14 ], where players move
a marker in a two dimensional field to express what mood they feel when music
plays. The purpose here is somewhat apparent, but everything else makes the game
fun and ergonomic, making it easy to forget what purpose the game serves. Naturally,
themore the purpose is encapsulated, the less it disturbs the player. However, it comes
with a price of additional design and engineering work.
Also, a question a SAG designer has to answer is whether to disclose the purpose
of the game to the player or not, i.e. whether to present the game as having a higher
purpose or to keep the purpose undeclared. Depending on the context (mostly the
player's mindset), this can have two outcomes: at one side the player may loose the
interest in the game, because (as Krause et al. warn us) he will start seeing a work
in it [ 11 ] or refuse to work for someone else for misanthropic reasons. On the other
hand, the higher purpose may appeal to the player and convince him to play a game
he would otherwise not play (a phenomenon we observed in our own research [ 20 ]).
Particularly, the player might be convinced, if he too would directly benefit from
the purpose (e.g. annotate his own images as in PexAce-Personal [ 18 ]). In all cases,
regardless if the player knows about the purpose or not, it is convenient if the game
encapsulates it.