State-of-the-Art: Design of the Semantics Acquisition Games - Semantic Acquisition Games: Harnessing Manpower for Creating Semantics - page 106

tasks to players may always start to measure the value of the tasks and prioritize
them or to measure players' competences and assign them with tasks according to
their skills).
It is also interesting to look how are the existing SAGs distributed throughout the
design dimension space: we have analyzed the existing SAG-based approaches and
identified “design patterns” they use along each dimension. In Table 7.1 we list the
identified patterns for each game (note that some SAGs use more than one pattern
per dimension). We summarize SAG distribution (number of SAGs) for each pattern
(per dimension) in the Fig. 7.2 .
For better visualization of coverage of the design space, we created Fig. 7.3 .In
it we used four of the six dimensions to create value combination grid. We used
artifact validation, anti-cheating measures, player challenges and task distribution.
To keep the table compact, needed to omit the dimensions of task difficulty and
purpose encapsulation. For each “design pattern” combination, we list a number of
SAGs using it. We colored the table segments—the more darker the area is, the more
repetitive the combination is.
We can see that SAGs are not uniformly distributed throughout the design dimen-
sion space. A particular dominant “combination” of design patterns comprises online
mutual player artifact validation, with socialization and competition as game aesthet-
ics. This combination corresponds to von Ahn's ESP game which is most well known
and many SAGs follow its general design, which could be labeled as “traditional”
SAG design. In the future, the relative weight (in terms of existing examples) could
be shifted to more novel patterns, for this however, we must wait.
Throughout the Fig. 7.3 , we can observe several “blank” areas. Although the
matrix is sparse, there are whole sections not covered by existing SAG solutions.
The question is, whether these blank spaces will be covered by some solutions in the
future. First, we considered two “primary” dimensions, artifact validation and player
challenges:

￿ The SAGs which are based on social experience aesthetics exercise online mutual

validation of artifacts. This is connected to the multiplayer nature of these games:
a social experience is hardly achievable without multiplayer scheme. So if we
already have a multiplayer SAG, it is natural to use online mutual validation of
artifacts. Use of other validation schemes here is possible for these games, but is
more likely considered redundant.

￿ On the other hand, the competition aesthetics that is used heavily within existing

SAGs is not exclusive for online mutual artifact validation. This is because of
the use of “offline” motivation features, such as ladders, which are available for
all types of games. However, it is questionable how effective this incentive is in
single-player games as the ladder can be considered as external motivation feature.
In the future, the SAGs in this setting will perhaps adopt the concept of endogenous
value (described by Schell [ 16 ]), which means they will enable players to re-use
their acquired ladder positions (or points, badges, etc.) in the game itself. This
would give an additional meaning for the external incentives and perhaps prolong
an average lifetime of the SAG.