Game with a purpose

A game with a purpose (or GWAP) is a game played on a computer that serves some purpose for the people setting up the game by harnessing human abilities in an entertaining setting.

There are many activities that are almost trivial for humans to perform that have stymied computers. These tasks can include labelling images to improve web searching, transcription of ancient text (where OCR software faces a script they are not optimized for and degraded or damaged images) and any activity requiring common sense or human experience.

The first example was the ESP Game, an effort in human computation originally conceived by Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University, which labels images. To make it an entertaining effort for humans two players attempt to assign the same labels to an image. The game records the results of matches as image labels and the players enjoy the encounter because of the competitive and timed nature of it. To ensure that people do their best to accurately label the images, the game requires two people (chosen at random and unknown to each other), who have only the image in common, to choose the same word as an image label. This discourages vandalism because it would be self defeating as a strategy.

A linguistic version of this design is a game called Phrase Detectives, developed by Essex University, which assigns anaphoric links within text. The game uses a decision-validation method to efficiently gather judgements from users, as well as to provide interuser scoring.

References

*Communications of the ACM, issue: 08/08 Vol. 51 NO. 8 (August 2008), article: Designing Games with a Purpose.
* [http://www.gwap.com/gwap/news/ www.gwap.com]

External links

* [http://www.gwap.com/gwap/news/ www.gwap.com]
* [http://www.ecoresearch.net/election2008/facebook Sentiment Quiz]
* [http://www.phrasedetectives.org/ www.phrasedetectives.org]