Everyone wins: crowdsourcing games and museums

by Mia on May 27, 2011

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Museums are seeking new ways to attract and engage audiences in a crowded digital landscape with a lot of competition for online time and attention. Games allow a fresh approach to museum interpretation and learning with the potential to reach large, traditionally hard-to-reach audiences. Player participation can also be harnessed to create benefits for museums and their audiences through games that help provide improve the quality of collection data, while encouraging a new type of audience engagement.

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Everyone wins: crowdsourcing games and museums — Presentation Transcript

Everyone wins: crowdsourcing games and museums
Mia Ridge, Open University
@mia_out
http://openobjects.blogspot.com
Museum Next, Edinburgh, May 26-27, 2011

Getting to epic win

First, some definitions
a magic circle
(but puppies aren't very good at casual games like Solitaire or Angry Birds and they're hopeless at metadata games like Pictionary)

'flow'
∞
flow channel
Challenges
Anxiety
Boredom
∞
0
Skills

'flow'
∞
flow channel
Challenges

clear goal
immediate feedback on the success of actions
good match between skills and challenges.

∞
0
Skills

Beware pointsification: “taking the thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience”
“a short-term sugar rush of engagement followed by a crash”
“emphasizes the shallow, dumb, non-interesting tasks, and it decreases motivation for interesting tasks that might be intrinsically motivated.”
Gamification?

Museum metadata games - 'difficult' objects:technical, near-duplicate, poorly catalogued or scantily digitised
'toy' model steam engines, Powerhouse Museum

On the way to epic win

Mind the (semantic) gap…
Why does he look sad?
Because the ordinary reader can’t tell why this object is significant
(It’s a model of a giant sun dial built in India in the 1720s; the largest stone observatory in the world)

…we can fix the gap…
Did you know? Pictures of cats with captions added are called 'lolcats'. This is a cute picture of a cat, but as it has no caption, it's not a lolcat.
Find other records tagged with: kitten, keyboard, laptop, bedroom, cute
added content

...but that’s expensive

…so get the public to help

…crowdsourcing works
galaxy zoo zooinverse has 425,000 volunteers #beyond2011 yesterdayvia web, alastairdunning

But now everyone knows crowdsourcing is good, you’re competing for eyeballs

…games for crowdsourcing
e.g. correcting OCR for libraries with DigitalKoot, Finland, one month after launch: 'over 2 million individual tasks, totalling 100,000 minutes, or 1,700 hours, of work'; Games with a purpose, 2008: 50 million verified tags

…games for crowdsourcing
20 million people in the UK play casual games; 250 million people play social games

One Facebook status update asking for players: 180 turns (176 tagging turns, 4 fact turns), 1179 tags and 4 facts about 145 objects from 26 players in c. 6 hours
(avg 10 minutes and over 8 pages per visit)

Games - participation engines for crowdsourcing
'magic circle' helps get people playing
good game mechanics motivate on-going play

Games - participation engines for crowdsourcing
tailor tasks and rewards to your data needs
design for specific player skills, motivation, types of fun
validate procrastination
careful design reduces the risk of disasters or 'accidents'

invoke the magic circle
clear task
make participating instant and easy

Active engagement
Players enjoy the objects
Close, active viewing
Curiosity and 'just one more'
Learning
Leaving a trace

Potential game 'atoms' for crowdsourcing

Tagging
Debunking
Recording a personal story
Linking
Stating preferences
Categorising
Creative responses

Ok, so far so good, but what about…?

Create an ecosystem of games

Engage a wider range of players
Simple games help clean and test data for use in other games
Validate and rate specialist content from complex tasks
Be creative - e.g. crowdsource the matching of activities to objects

Problems?

Make a game for each problem

More win?

Design easy, feel-good tasks to get started
Help players acquire, test and master new skills
Fun is personal - iterative playtests with real people

The possibility of failure makes it interesting
∞
flow channel
Challenges
Anxiety
Boredom
∞
0
Skills

Still not perfect?

Keep experimenting

…and share what you learn FTW

Everyone wins!
Crowdsourcing games are:
fun
engaging
productive
Players learn new information and skills
Museums can learn from players

Thank you!
Mia Ridge, Open University
@mia_out
Games:
http://museumgam.es
Blog:
http://openobjects.blogspot.com
Yay, new content!

Everyone wins: crowdsourcing games and museums

by Mia on May 27, 2011

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Everyone wins: crowdsourcing games and museums — Presentation Transcript