State-of-the-Art: Semantics Acquisition Games - Semantic Acquisition Games: Harnessing Manpower for Creating Semantics - page 34

Serious Games

...

Learning support
games

Games for Health Human Computation Games Marketing virals

Crowdsourcing games

Semantics acquisition
games

Other crowdsourcing games

Domain modelling games Resource description games

Atomic fact
collectors

Ontology
expansion games

Ontology
connecting games

Text description
games

Multimedia
description games

Image description
games

Audio description
games

Video description
games

Fig. 3.1 A taxonomy of crowdsourcing games within serious games

As an illustrative example, the probably most successful SAG to this day, the ESP
Game is often presented. The game acquires image descriptions (tags). It is a game for
two players who are given the same image as only connection between them—they
do not know each other and cannot communicate. Their task is to agree on the same
word describing the given image and only after that they receive winning points. It is
apparent that these players have virtually no chance of agreeing on a word that is not
related to the image. Therefore if they agree on some, it is highly probable that this
word describes the image and a textual annotation for the image can be created [ 24 ].
Naturally, crowdsourcing games are also a part of a group of computer programs
we usually call games (with all their usual characteristics [ 16 ]). Between the two
concepts (“the crowdsourcing game” and “the game”), in the concept hierarchy,
lies the concept of serious games , which comprises all types of computer games,
designed not only to entertain. These include marketing games, games for health or
educational games [ 4 ]. The crowdsourcing games are just another category of serious
games (the taxonomic overview of these concepts can be seen in the Fig. 3.1 ).
There is also another term for describing the crowdsourcing games (resp. seman-
tics acquisition games)—the game with a purpose (GWAP). It was coined by Luis
von Ahn [ 22 ] as a first term to describe this phenomenon and is often used in the
literature. Yet, the use of the term is often disputed. At one point is used to describe
the crowdsourcing games (or even semantics acquisition games only). On the other
hand, if taken literally, the expression “with a purpose” may refer to any “useful”
effect (apart from the entertainment) achieved by the game, so from that perspective
it will fit to any “serious game”. We therefore try not to use the term GWAP in this
work, but but use “crowdsourcing game” and “semantics acquisition game” instead
(unless we specifically refer to the works of Luis von Ahn).