Museum Games and UGC: Improving Collections Through Play

Museum Games and UGC: Improving Collections Through Play
Mia Ridge, Open University, @mia_out

Overview
The magic circle (and other definitions)
About MMG (Museum Metadata Games)
Benefits of museum crowdsourcing games
Best practice in crowdsourcing game design

The magic circle (and other definitions...)

‘flow’

Gamification?
“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.”

About ‘Museum Metadata Games’

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

In evaluation period: 6039 tags (2232 unique tags), average 18 tags per object
Average time on site over 7 minutes, 6.5 pages per visit
But - visitors via Facebook averaged 10 minutes and over 8 pages per visit

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

Crowdsourcing games work
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'
GWAP, 2008: 50 million verified tags

Games are 'participation engines'
Games demolish barriers to participation
Games drive on-going participation
Games encourage super-taggers
Games provide lavish feedback and rewards for effort

Benefits of museum crowdsourcing games
The magic circle works
You make the rules - design for the data you need
New forms of engagement with collections
Games encourage informal content that bridges the ‘semantic gap’

Museum crowdsourcing games are
good at:
not-so-good at:
Mental challenge
Mystery, curiosity, discovery
Novelty (sorta)
Instant gameplay
Epic meaning, blissful productivity
Infinite gameplay
Mastery - how to teach skills, scaffold the learning experience, provide meaningful feedback?
Flow – needs variable difficulty; balance between boredom and anxiety

Help win the competition for eyeballs
(AKA competing for 'participation bandwidth')
Design for instant action, gratification
Build instructions and requirements into gameplay
Reward on-going play
Don't require registration
Validate procrastination – help people feel good about playing
Polish is vital – 'worthy' isn't good enough

More lessons learned
Design for flow e.g variable levels of difficulty
Fun is personal - design for a specific player persona, test with real audiences
Quality of feedback and scoring systems counts
Help players acquire, test and master new skills

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

Potential game 'atoms'
Tagging
Debunking
Recording a personal story
Linking
Stating preferences
Categorising
Creative responses

Dealing with problem data?

Thank you!
Questions?
Mia Ridge
@mia_out
Games: http://museumgam.es/
Blog: http://openobjects.blogspot.com

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Museum Games and UGC: Improving Collections Through Play

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