Gamification can be a very powerful technique for collective action, for motivating and encouraging large numbers of people to come together and work on a common task or set of tasks. I already talked about something related to this when I described Stack Overflow and showed how the gamification design for that site encouraged pro social and, in some cases, collaborative behavior, like people commenting and responding on each others questions. But, what if you have a specific objective. Stack Overflow is designed to be a forum for people learning about and getting better at programming. What if you have a task that you want to solve and you want to employ the energy and ideas and enthusiasm of a large number of people towards it? There are a number of different scenarios where this might be the case. Some of them we've actually already looked at. So, let me give you a framework to understand what I'm talking about. I'll draw two axes here. One of them, we'll say, is competitive versus collaborative. [BLANK_AUDIO] In other words, are people working together with each other or against each other in trying to achieve the task and the other one would be top down versus bottom up. Traditionally the way people are motivated and encouraged to do things is top down. Someone says, this is what you will do. The alternative approach is to do it in a more bottom up way by getting them to be motivated to do it themselves. So, in this first quadrant here, competitive top down, this would be grants so this is where a company or foundation organization says we want to find someone who's going to do a certain amount of research to achieve something or get a certain result. And so we'll pick a winner and then give them the money to do it. The alternative approach that's bottom up was described in one of the earlier sessions, that's where we would put the inducement prizes. Still competitive people, or organizations, or groups are competing to win the prize but now it's bottom up. Anyone can submit to the prize and the organization only pays out to the winner. Here, on the collaborative side, is what I'm going to talk about more in this lecture. The traditional approach is to use employees. So, if you want a group of people to work together to solve a problem, you tell them to do it. The alternative, though, is what's called crowdsourcing, or in some cases, microwork. This is a family of approaches that encourage people to come together to either collaborate with each other or to each take a small part or a small amount of effort towards a task. But the people are not workers for the entity that puts forth the task. They're are people who are motivated through a bunch of different mechanisms that I'm about to talk about, voluntarily to take on the task. So, what is it that might motivate people to take on a task if it's not for their employer? Well, one thing is, of course, money. So, there are a number of platforms. Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which I'm showing you here, is the biggest and best known, which provides an environment for this collaborative crowdsourced microwork. For people to voluntarily work on certain tasks, typically for money. Doesn't have to be for money but typically these are situations where a company wants something done. They want someone to go check out a bunch of websites or review a bunch of documents. Do some sort of task that requires some level of human intelligence. Amazon calls them here, human intelligence tasks. You may not be able to see it on the graphic here, it's a little small, but they're task that can't easily be done by a computer, because if they could easily be done by a computer we'd just have a computer do them. The computers are a lot cheaper and faster than people, but lots of things require some degree of thought and discrimination that humans do well, so Mechanical Turk and other things like it are platforms for people to come and do those tasks, and typically they get paid a small amount for doing it, and this has been quite successful, as you see here. There are over 200,000 of these tasks available today on Mechanical Turk. So, this is one form of crowdsourcing. But, as I've talked about throughout the class, money is not necessarily the only thing that motivates people. So, is it possible to motivate people to participate in these crowdsourced projects without necessarily paying them to do it? Indeed, it is. And the way to do it is to use gamification. Let me show you a few examples. This is something called Foldit. I didn't put the URL on here. But, it is just fold.it. Foldit. This is a site that was developed by some biomedical researchers at the University of Washington. And they are working on 3D protein folding. It turns out that the three dimensional shape that a protein molecule folds up into has a tremendous impact on what it does in the body. So, if we know the 3D shape, we are much further along in developing drugs based on those proteins and those other molecules. But it's incredibly computationally difficult to figure out what shape a molecule will fold into. However, people are really good at figuring this out because it's a puzzle. It's something that involves looking at the shapes and figuring out the most efficient configuration. And so, Foldit is a game like system that gives you some real world proteins and asks you to figure out the most efficient lay out. And by making this process game like, by making it seem like fun, these researchers were able to motivate thousands of people to come together and work on these problems with some tremendous success. So, there was a case in which there was a molecule that's important for AIDS research, has to do with the monkey virus that's similar to AIDS, where for 15 years researchers have been trying to figure out the the 3D fold, folding shape of that molecule and unfold it. Volunteers were able to figure it out in just ten days. Incredible success, and they have had another, a number of other examples like that where this aspect of making something feel fun or puzzle like and also telling people it's part of helping medical research has been very successful at motivating participation which has gotten to great results. Now the funny thing is, a lot of the press that came out after this, development was announced involving the monkey virus talked about video gamers solving the problem. Online gamers were the ones who had solved the puzzle and, and cracked the medical research problem and I thought that was kind of ironic. Because these people were gamers only in the sense that Foldit was a game. It wasn't that Foldit deliberately recruited only people who actively played certain kinds of online games, they were gamers because they were using a site that was gamified. Foldit is a, a very good example but there are a number of other examples like this where applying game-like structures can encourage voluntary participation in crowdsourced activities. Here's another one from a company called Microtask in Finland where they partnered with the Finish National Library which was trying to digitize major historical works in Finish. And they needed people to review and proofread the optical character recognition. So, they created this thing called Digital Koot, that is basically a game where you play these creatures. I don't really know what these are. But and they're building a bridge across the river. And the component pieces of the bridge are words that have been interpreted by the optical character recognition system. And you need to see if the words are correct and you use this game to feed in your work to the process of checking the digitization of the, finished works. And they were able, through this process, to get a huge number of people to participate and to review 2.5 million specific examples in this digitization process. Again, not by paying people, but by encouraging them by making it fun. Now, Microtask also has a business that uses the same game like interfaces in environments where they do pay people, the game then just encourages and increases the level of motivation. And then they go out to paying clients who want to do things like form processing, where you want to understand optical character recognition of handwritten forms. And you're willing to pay an amount of money to Microtask which then can pay a little bit to each of the participants and the company gets back much better results on the quality of their forms. The gamification there becomes not the only form of motivation but something that dramatically increases the level of motivation and gets more people to participate. In some cases, crowdsourcing and microwork can be done without people even fully understanding that that's what they're doing. Lewis Von On is a researcher at Carnegie Melon University who is one of the leaders in developing what he calls games with a purpose. One of the ones that he originally developed was this example here called the ESP game. Which is a cute little game that shows people a picture, here we see a bunch of sheep. And says, what is this? Type in what this is. And the same thing is given to two different people. So you type in here what you think it is, and the system says, did you and the other person type in the same word? Because if two people looking at an image type in the same word, there's a pretty high likelihood that that word corresponds to the image. conversely, if people type in different things then, maybe, those are not right and that provides some more data to the system. What's the point of this? Well, it's kind of fun for the players to figure out if you're matching with other people, if you get the right description of something. And in fact they got lots of people to participate in it, and try and get a high score, and engage in it in the same way that I talked about for other examples of gamification. The point of this though, for the company setting it up, is improving image search. Very hard for a computer to look at this, and know this is sheep. We've got lots of great research on visual recognition and computer vision, but it's still not as good as a person doing it. So, this is a way of improving the quality of image search and meta tagging images for search engines. And, in fact, Google bought, the company bought the technology that Von On had developed for this ESP game in order to improve their image search. Now here again, this is not something like the prior examples where people were being told, you're participating in image search. People were just being told here is something fun and they're doing it to the extent that it's fun. So, gamification can be used both in situations where people know explicitly know what they're doing or in situations were they are just being encouraged to participate in some way in what turns out to be a crowdsourced activity. So, what kinds of situations lend themselves well? Well, they need to be tasks that can be split up easily, fairly obvious, it needs to be a task that lots of people can work on in parallel, either that means each person gets a little segment of the task or many persons are simultaneously trying to solve the task. And it also needs to be a task, as I talked about before, that people are good at doing. Because, if either it's too hard for people to do or, it's too easy for computers to do, those, the people are not the best possible solution. The second major element is, it has to be something where, a gamified system is a good motivational technique. There are three basic ways people can be motivated to do something crowdsourced. One is for money. One is for love, it's something that they care about, that's important to them. The Finnish library example might be a good example, if people in that country want to promote the preservation of Finnish literature. Another example was when Jim Gray, who was a famous computer science researcher, disappeared on his boat in the ocean. People volunteered to scour satellite maps to try and figure out if they could find evidence of his ship because they cared a lot about trying to save this guy who was a very revered figure in the field. So, they did it, not for money or because the task was fun but because they cared about the result, so that's another situation. And the third is people being motivated for fun. And, and this one is really the one that we're most concerned about in gamification. But, as I talked about with, the, earlier examples. More than one of these can be present at the same time, and fun, game-like approaches tend to be something that can magnify the level of engagement, even if it's already there and being reinforced by some other mechanism. So, inducement prizes, virtual economies, crowdsourcing are three different techniques for expanding the scope of gamification, going beyond dealing with a specific objective within a company or for a company vis a vis its customer base. And, as I've talked about, they can relate to each other in different ways. But they all rely upon the same basic motivational techniques and lessons that we've been seeing throughout this entire course.
