Frontiers of a Paradigm – Exploring Human Computation with Digital Games Markus Krause * Research Group Digital Media TZI, University of Bremen 28359 Bremen Germany phateon@tzi.de Aneta Takhtamysheva † Research Group Digital Media TZI, University of Bremen 28359 Bremen Germany aneta@tzi.de Marion Wittstock Research Group Digital Media TZI, University of Bremen 28359 Bremen Germany wittstock@tzi.de Rainer Malaka Research Group Digital Media TZI, University of Bremen 28359 Bremen Germany malaka@tzi.de ABSTRACT Each day millions of people play digital games with differ- ent motivations. These motivations rang from time beating to deep immersion into a narration or interacting with a community. To address all these different means, a range of game designs is necessary. Traditional human computation games cannot present all these aspects yet. This work will give a game centered view on game design for human computation. To demonstrate the value of this view it will present a fast-paced action game called OnTo- Galaxy along with two different human computation tasks. 1. INTRODUCTION Since human computation is integrated into digital games and has become relevant for science and industry, different fields of its application have been explored. The evolved designs have proved to be effective as well as efficient in many situations. An overview of current human computa- tion games and relevant publications on game design will be given in section 2. On the one hand human computation games provide a unique game play experience. On the other hand, they are focused on a special task and tightly aligned to it. This de- sign focus makes them a game category on their own. Even though a range of appearances of human computation games has been presented, their core design is to some extent ho- mogeneous. Many works on human computation with dig- ital games are centered around a certain task or problem * Funded by the Klaus Tschira Foundation. † Funded by the Klaus Tschira Foundation. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. KDD-HCOMP ’10, July 25, 2010, Washington, DC, USA Copyright 2010 ACM 978-1-4503-0222-7 ...$10.00 . domain. Significantly fewer works are investigating possible game design aspects in the context of human computation. This paper will focus on the paradigm of using digital games for human computation. Section 3 will demonstrate how to design a game comparable to other casual games that are played by millions of players every day. Benefits and drawbacks of using this design will be discussed as well in section 3. 2. RELATED WORK Digital games with a human computation task have a range of designs. They can be puzzles, multi-player envi- ronments or virtual worlds. They also have many applica- tion domains. Common tasks for human computation games are for instance relation learning or resource labeling. A well known example in this regard is the GWAP [18] se- ries. Other games try to use human computation for natural language processing like Phrase Detectives [6] or TwinMind and Actionary [16]. Yet others, like OntoGame [15] are used to build and learn ontologies. These games preform human computation by integrating their task into puzzle-like games. Even though many games are very similar in their use of design elements, some are different. HeardIt, for instance, stresses user centered design as its core idea [3]. This makes it different from other human computation games that are mostly designed around a certain task as their core element. HeardIt also allows direct text interaction between players during the game session, which is prohibited in other games to prevent cheating [19]. KissKissBan [9] is another game with special elements. It is a game that involves a direct conflict between players. One player tries to prevent the “kissing” of two other players by labeling images. Another game that is special according to its design ele- ments is Plummings [17]. This game aims at reducing the critical path of FPGAs. Unlike other games the task is sepa- rated from the game mechanics. The game is about a colony of so-called Plummings who need adequate air supply. By keeping the length of the air tubes as short as possible the player saves the colony from suffocation. Another interesting game is FoldIt [4]. This game aims on folding proteins, which is a complex task. It is a single player