Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
competition, socialization, self-challenge, discovery which are found in regular
games. They also inherited drawbacks of regular games: the malicious player behav-
ior, with which they also needed to deal with.
Many issues remain open. For example, there are still challenges in quality control
of player outputs. One of the possible research directions regarding this are methods
taking into account the different skill levels of individual players. Only recently, the
SAG designers started to think about working with player expertise information,
which is more common in general crowdsourcing.
The SAGs proved very strong, when the content they work with is attractive to
players (e.g. multimedia), but lack breath when they are working with texts (a case
especially for domain modeling games). The lack of ability to attract players is the
main reason why many SAGs are de facto dead projects, although their design appear
sound. It is often caused by lack of the “purpose encapsulation”, often criticized by
players who perceive SAGs as type of work, others simply refuse to be “outsourced
for free”. It is unfortunate, but unless a much deeper insight into the crowdsourcing
game aesthetics is given by game design researchers and practitioners, the SAGs
(many of which are created by people from the “target problem domains”, i.e. not
game designers) will continue to have the attractiveness issues.
From a researcher's perspective, there is yet more one drawback regarding SAGs:
there is no regularly established and internationally accepted forum dedicated to
SAGs. The research community around SAGs is instead spread among much wider
crowdsourcing community, or distributed across problem domains to which the pur-
poses of the games belong (e.g. ontology building, image annotation, image acqui-
sition in context of geo-space, music information retrieval).
9.1 Brighter Future
Nevertheless, we see the future of the field (SAG and general crowdsourcing) as
optimistic. As anecdotically envisioned by Luis von Ahn, in the future, every manual
task will be done by machines. The people would then be split into two classes:
those, who will create the SAGs and those, who will only “eat, sleep and play” 1
them, solving the human intelligence tasks, which machines won't be able to solve.
Although this is vastly exaggerated, a more realistic point can be made out of
it. The overall technological advances of human civilization, automation of man-
ual tasks etc. may potentially relieve more and more human laborers. On the other
hand, unless a major breakthrough is made in a field of practical artificial intelli-
gence, there will still be an increasingdemand for performing human intelligence
tasks (e.g. programming the manual workers). Hence, the crowdsourcing will be
a convenient option for saturating the tensions. We believe, that crowdssourcing
with all its methods, will make an efficient endeavor.
1 A phrase acronym of which gave a name to Ahn's most renown game, the ESP.
 
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