Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
We do not yet know, which of the paradigms of the crowdsourcing will be
dominant in such world, be it either SAGs, micro-payment mechanisms such as
Amazon Mechanical Turk or something else. We believe, that more probable case is
the second. “Turking” is much more straightforward to prepare, covers (even today)
much more domains (e.g. business intelligence) that SAGs have not reached yet.
It also provides money to the contributors—a very strong incentive (some of the
available crowdsourcing tasks are comparable to low paying jobs in terms of finan-
cial income for the contributor). Many payment-based crowdsourcing platform users
complement their primary salaries with “crowdsourcing money”, although they usu-
ally need another motivation to participate. But, the money are also the downside:
the task owners have limited budgets and would appreciate another type of motiva-
tions, such as entertainment provided by SAGs. SAGs will also have an advantage
of engaging potential contributions during time they consider “free”, something that
“work-like” approach would have problem with.
In any way, the steady rise of crowdsourcing utilization will be significantly fueled
by today's almost ubiquitous availability of personal computing devices, especially
mobile ones. While in the past, the crowdsourcing approaches heavily relied on
the Web environment, today they too start adapt to major paradigm shift to mobile
devices. The potential is clear: unlocking of many hours of “availableness” of the
users (e.g. traveling, waiting).
Micro-payment schemes have the advantage here, some vendors already provide
mobile morphs of their original web applications.
2
For SAGs, this transition may
take more time and effort: a game must be carefully adjusted to different features of
the mobile interface. Some of the SAGs designs may even be infeasible, for example
because they require large display or heavily rely on typing, which is not a popular
activity of the today's mobile device users (e.g. our PexAce). On the other hand, many
currently existing SAGs may be transformed to mobile versions straightforwardly
(e.g. our CityLights). Some new SAGs are even exclusive to the mobile devices—
they are used for harvesting real world geographical information [
1
].
References
1. Chen, L.J., Syu, Y.S., Chen, H.C., Lee, W.C.: The design and evaluation of task assignment
algorithms for gwap-based geospatial tagging systems. Mob. Netw. Appl.
17
(3), 395-414 (2012)
2. Pe-Than, E.P.P., Goh, D.H.L., Lee, C.S.: A typology of human computation games: an analysis
and a review of current games. Behav. Inf. Technol.
33
, 1-16 (2014)