Community-based game design: experiments on social games for commonsense data collection

Games with A Purpose have successfully harvested information from web users. However, designing games that encourage sustainable and quality data contribution remains a great challenge. Given that many online communities have enjoyed active participation from a loyal following, this research explores how human computation games may benefit from rich interactions inherent in a community. We experimented by implementing two games for commonsense data collection on the leading social community platforms: the Rapport Game on Facebook and the Virtual Pet Game on PTT. In this paper, we present the choices of interaction mode and goal-oriented user model for building a community-based game. The data quality, collection efficiency, player retention, concept diversity, and game stability of both games are analyzed quantitatively from data collected since August/November 2008. Our findings should provide useful suggestions for designing community-based games in the future.