Applications of Games With A Purpose Suhas Aggarwal suhasagg@gmail.com

Abstract—In this paper, we describe a gaming portal which host different games with a purpose. Games include Similar choices which help in E-commerce analytics, Label Graphs which help in comprehensive graphs analysis, Tag Earth for Geo-Data Tagging, Game for tagging complex objects such as news, articles, art. It also features a fun game ‘Pick Quality’ based on ESP game architecture which is for fun/entertainment. Portal also has other features such as classic games, online shopping where credits obtained from playing games can be utilized.

Keywords-Games with a purpose, Ecommerce Analytics, Graph Analytics, Tagging articles, videos, art, Tagging Geo-Data, Gaming Portal.

I. INTRODUCTION

Games with a purpose utilize collective intelligence, which is described as combining “behavior, preferences, or ideas of a group of people to create useful results” [1]. Collective intelligence from groups of people often produces better results than individual subject specialists [2]. With the help of browser-based games, voluntary internet users do fun tasks that are relative easy for humans to do but difficult to impossible for computers, for example labeling of or locating objects in random images found in the web. The main challenges when creating such games are motivating users to play the game while generating useful data, and ensuring that the process yields unbiased results. In the recent years, several applications of games with a purpose have been discovered such as tagging images[5], music[9], collecting common sense data.[8] Several games have been designed such as Foldit, Eterna which applications in biology problems such as protein folding. Phrase Detectives is an "annotation game" geared towards lovers of literature, grammar and language. It lets users indicate relationships between words and phrases to create a resources that is rich in linguistic information.

gwap.com[5][7] is the gaming portal which originated games with a purpose with collection of many games developed at Carnegie Mellon University. In this paper, we describe another portal developed hosting games useful in different domains. It is also useful in interlinking different games where data collected from one game can be utilized by other. For example, Tag graphs generated from Tag Articles/Videos/Art game, described in the later section can be analyzed by Label graphs game and hence produce comprehensive analysis. Also, data collected from different games can be utilized to draw relationships between different objects such as for example, between articles, videos, images.

II. GAMES

A. Similar Choices

'Similar Choices' can be used as application of games with a purpose in E-commerce Analytics. Different products currently active in the market are displayed to the players. Player and his/her partner are shown a product, they have to type in response to their product. Information about these products is collected from online shopping websites. Responses can be cool, ok, perfect, highly recommended, must buy!, looks great!, not recommended etc. Each of these responses have a particular score. Different responses can have same scores and responses with marginal difference e.g.- 5 points are also accepted but player and his/her partner get less points in this scenario as compared to when their is perfect match. For example, must buy! can have 50 points, cool - 40 points, perfect - 40 points, highly recommended - 40 points, ok - 25 points. If player and his/her partner's response has a SIMILAR SCORE, their choice is considered to be identical and they both get certain points. In this way cumulative points of a certain product can be calculated based on user responses and its rating/popularity as compared to other products can be established. Also, data such as feedback, suggestions, questions regarding products can be collected via this game. Below figures illustrate the example of book review done through Similar Choices.

Figure 1: Oxford Dictionary getting displayed for getting players feedbacks

Figure 2: Book reviews: Feedbacks to various books provided by the players

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Figure 8, shows tagging example for news article, users read the article at link and tag it accordingly. Tags are ranked via Offlimit words. Old/Historical Newspapers/Articles are commonly available as Scanned pdfs. Tags generated from game can increase their accessibility via search. Figure 9, illustrates tagging of historic newspaper.

Figure 9: An Old/Historical newspaper article getting displayed to tag

ii)TAG Videos

Figure 10: A Linking Park song video getting displayed to the user to Tag

Figure 11: Different Tags Identifying context such as pop, music are identical, snake, python are identical. Also tags can be both generic labels as well as those depicting Reaction/Emotions

iii)TAG ART

Tag art is a game which ask users to assign tags to pieces of art such as paintings. Tags can be a generic label or a review label such as excellent, okay, etc. As paintings are complex, users can enter multiple keywords as in case of videos/articles.

Figure 12: A painting getting displayed to tag

Figure 13: Paintings with various labels

It can also be useful in News/Video Analytics and can be used to obtain feedback/reactions corresponding to News Articles/Videos such as excellent, cool, happy, sad etc. Emotion Tags/ Feedback Tags obtained via games can help in comprehensive sentiment analysis of various objects such as images from image sharing websites such as flickr, news articles from different News websites, videos from video sharing websites, of social networks, e-communities present. Tags obtained can be used to obtain connection between objects such as news articles, videos.

As Games, also serve the purpose of feedback system, they can be used to generate ranking of various objects such as products available in the market belonging to different categories and generate ranking/comparison of products of similar category belonging to different brands. Ranking of news articles, videos can be generated based on quantity of different feedbacks obtained such as excellent, good, ok etc. As Games use the concept of off-limit in tagging, tags obtained for various objects such as videos, news articles etc can be ranked, common tags which are high in number and have become off-limit words earlier obtain high rankings as compared to other tags generated by players.

Figure 14: Tag Graph

Tags which are higher ranked as obtained from games form the vertex of the graph and which occur in more news articles, videos, images form a network. Tag Graph is shown in figure 14. In this way, deeper relationships between news articles, videos, images can be obtained based on complexity of the graph. Portal also features a game for assigning emotion tags to images obtained from image sharing sites such as flickr.

E. Pick Quality

Pick Quality is a fun game utilizing ESP Game framework. In Pick Quality, images of superheroes from various movies, games, comics are shown to the player, they have to give the quality of the superhero, if both players give the same quality, they get points. After sometime, common/predominant quality become off-limits and players will have to type in a different quality of the superhero which

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