Teldan INFO 2016 conference
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A short talk about crowdsourcing and how games / gamification can be used to engage crowds and complete micro-tasks
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Teldan INFO 2016 conference
- 1. Massive Fun Games + Crowds Yaniv Corem
- 2. Crowd + Sourcing A bottom-up problem-solving technique
- 3. CrowdFunSourcing A better bottom-up problem-solving technique
- 4. OxGalton
- 9. GWAP Games With A Purpose
- 10. 2003 Values Jam
- 11. Deep Blue Watson
- 13. What the crowd knows about Fast Food Restaurants Games for Crowds: A Crowdsourcing Game Platform for the EnterpriseGuess who?: enriching the social graph through a crowdsourcing game
- 14. Difficult is good Play means the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles Too difficult is bad Progression through Small Wins Flow Blissful productivity
Editor's Notes
- I’ve always been intrigued by what crowds can do when properly motivated. Take this picture for example. Every year, thousands of people step out of their homes with a pillow in hand and beat the crap outta each other. Imagine the sensation of hitting someone over the head with a pillow...so much fun and none of the conseqiences. This is a short presentation I gave for the Teldan INFO 2016 Conference at the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv, Israel on May 23rd, 2016. More about the conference: http://www.teldan.com/Teldan08/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=10000&FID=833
- Crowdsourcing is (obviously) the combination of two words: crowd and sourcing, but more importantly, it’s a bottom-up problem-solving technique.
- Crowdsourcing requires some conditions are met in order to be effective. The first and most obvious one is that you have a crowd. In this case, size DOES matter...and you need a lot of people for this technique to work. The problem is that even if you get enough people involved, how do you get them to do what you want? That’s where fun comes in. Fun provides the motivation for people to engage with the crowdsourcing tasks...and enjoy themselves in the process.
- Any self-respecting presentation about crowdsourcing starts with the story about Sir Francis Galton and the ox. I have no idea if the story is real, but here’s how it goes. Galton, a stuck-up old English nobleman, went for a walk through the countryside and stumbled upon an auction of an ox at a local fair. Delighted at the opportunity to reinforce his belief that social status is designed by nature, he decided to do some research. He asked the crowd to guess the ox’s weight before it is butchered. He collected around 800 slips of paper with the crowd’s guesses and when back home to do some math. Galton discovered that the average guess of the crowd was closer to the ox’s real weight than any other individual guess and even better than the guesses of professional butchers in the crowd. This phenomenon of collective intelligence was later nicknamed Crowdsourcing and it’s a powerful concept for problem solving hairy problems.
- For example, drafting a new constitution is a hairy problem. Recently, Mexico City has asked nearly 9 million residents to help draft its new constitutition using Change.org Chilangos, as locals are known, can petition for issues to be included in the constitution through Change.org (link in Spanish), and make their case in person if they gather more than 10,000 signatures. They can also annotate proposals by the constitution’s drafters via PubPub, an editing platform (Spanish) similar to Google Docs.
- Digitizing books is another hairy problem. Professor Luis von Ahn from Carnegie Mellon University first invented the Captcha - a simple yet effective way of filtering out bots on the web using human’s superior OCR (Optical Character Recognition) abilities. So, if you wanted to sign up for a new service on the web, submit a form, etc. you had to type in a squiggly word to let the system know that you were human and not machine. One day, Prof. Ahn realized that this was a huge waste of valuable (human) computing resources and created reCaptcha which uses the same principles as the standard Captcha, but uses the words we type in to digitize old books. reCaptcha use two words (instead of one) to determine the accuracy of the input. One of the two words is known to the system and the other is not. So, as a user, if you typed in correctly the word that is known, the system has greater assurance that you also typed in correctly the unknown word.
- Prof. Ahn is also responsible for the ESP Game (acquired by Google) which uses human computation to tag images on the web. Two players enter the game and are asked to describe what they see in a random image. There are certain taboo words which the players can’t use because they’re pretty obvious and known to the system. The players get a fixed amount of time to input as many words as they can. If both of them type in the same word, then they each get rewarded with points. This is what Prof. Ahn calls an “Input Agreement Game” where both players must agree on the input in order to advance. This principle, again, gives the system a greater assurance that the input is valid. Essentially, Prof. Ahn used a game to motivate people to correctly tag images for free!
- What’s the difference between these two crowdsourcing projects? In the reCaptcha project people have to participate. They have to fill out the words if they want to gain access to the website or form they need. In the imagine tagging project people don’t have to participate. In fact, it’s pretty boring tagging pictures. So, Prof. Ahn turned the micro-task of tagging into a game. By using very simple game mechanics - points, time, competition, etc. - he was able to get more people to help him solve his problem.
- Prof. Ahn went on to create a whole platform of similar games which he termed GWAPs - Games with a Purpose. He used the game and game mechanics as a vehicle to move people’s minds from point A to point B - creating engagement around activities that would otherwise be...well, boring.
- In 2003, IBM undertook the first reexamination of its values in nearly 100 years. Through "Values-Jam," an unprecedented 72-hour discussion on IBM's global intranet, IBMers came together to define the essence of the company. The result? A set of core values, defined by IBMers for IBMers, that shape the way they lead, the way they decide, and the way they act. Essentially, IBM crowdsourced its corporate culture.
- IBM also has a rich history with games. In the 80’s IBM created Deep Blue, a super-computer that went on to beat Gary Kasparov, Chess grandmaster and champion. In 2011, IBM created Watson, another super-computer that defeated two of Jeopardy's all-time best players. When I joined IBM Research in 2010, there were initial attempts to help Watson get better (and eventually win) at Jeopardy using the “Wisdom of the Crowd” (aka crowdsourcing). The idea was to create a simple trivia game where people would be presented with a topic and asked to dump everything they knew about this topic using tags and keywords.
- The result was IBM GUESS (later expanded into a gaming platform called Games for Crowds) which presented players with a general topic like Fast Food Restaurants and gave them a minute to punch in everything they knew about the subject. Now, whenever a player put in a term for the first time, they would get no points at all. However, when other players also put in the same term (reinforcing the term), they would receive dividend points and advance up the leaderboard.
- The result was a ranked list of terms generated in a bottom-up fashion using nothing but the collective intelligence of the crowd. The research around the game was published in several academic venues two of which are listed at the bottom of the slide.
- I hope this short presentation whetted your appetite, but if you’re still hungry here’s some takeaway for you. The philosopher Bernard Suits defined play (or more accurately, the Lusory Effect) as a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. The point is that sometimes removing all obstacles from your user’s way is not the way to go. Users want (and need) a challenge, something that motivates them to keep moving forward through the experience you provide. But...and this is a big but...don’t make the obstacles too difficult or you’ll cause users to get frustrated and give up. Provide small wins along the way to keep user motivated and moving forward. Which leads to the third takeaway, Flow...or more specifically, the Theory of Flow conceived by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly who suggested there is a channel of flow between skill and challenge that when challenge is larger than skill the result is frustration and when skill is larger than challenge the result is boredom.
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