Our SAGs: Design Aspects and Improvements - Semantic Acquisition Games: Harnessing Manpower for Creating Semantics - page 121

creating meaningful annotations may help him a lot in improving his score, so the
player is usually motivated to do it. And he does it.
The game can stay single-player this way. Its scoring function is objective, exact,
transparent and can be executed automatically. This greatly boosts the game in its
early stages of deployment—there is no cold start problem regarding insufficient
number of players wanting to play or a need for an existing validation data set. And
still, even if the score is not computed out of the quality of the artifacts created, the
players create them and they create them in quality (they truly describe the given
images), because otherwise, they would not be useful for them.
This is a new method of artifact validation in SAGs which we call the helper
artifacts . It is based on a principle that in order to build a SAG, we firstly create
a non-purpose game (or take one existing game, such as Concentration) with its own
scoring system. Then we add new features to the game that would enable players
to (slightly) ease the overcoming of the obstacles in the game (e.g. adding a tool
for labeling the images for aiding their memory). The only condition left is that the
actions (or artifacts they create) that the players are helping themselves with, must
also be useful outside the game.
We believe that this concept can be used widely for SAGs. If we consider the
domain of resource description only, a memory-based games similar to PexAce
could be devised for other types of resources (video streams, audio). Also, not only
textual artifacts could be product of player helping themselves: instead they can draw
sketches on the screen or record a voice through audio input devices.
An interesting option for using the helper artifacts may also be to restrict their set
of possible values to enable categorization. For example, in a hypothetical “music
card, PexAce-like game”, the only possible options to annotate the cards would be
different moods that can be experienced during music listening.
The use of helper artifacts within a game is flexible which has a potential in
balancing the game. The game can be either heavily “populated” with them or use
them only sparsely. The moving between these extremes is easily done: you can limit
the player by number of helper artifacts he can create. This may prove important in
case we discover that players feel that the game is not very attractive because “it
looks like a work” or “it is boring”. In such case a SAG based on some other artifact
validation method may prove hard to be improved. However, with helper artifacts,
one can simply reduce their presence in the game and give more weight to other
(potentially more attractive) features of the game.
8.2.2 Apparent Purpose and Motivation to Play PexAce
8.2.2.1 PexAce for General Images
The PexAce does not encapsulate its purpose . A player playing PexAce, who is
aware of the image metadata concept may quickly recognize the “trick” the game is
using to acquire the image annotations. After the game was deployed, several players