House of Ads: a Multiplayer Action Game for Annotating Ad Video Content

Content-based search in a large collection of media is a task that cannot be fully automated. Semantic annotations provided by humans through crowdsourcing techniques can be attached to media elements in the form of metadata and be used by search engines to provide the required results. However, the manual annotation of large collections is a tedious and time-consuming process and proper incentives need to be provided to attract contributors. Games with a purpose, or human computation games are based on the idea that people could solve computational tasks while playing online games. Numerous such games have been created and used in various areas, including media annotation. However, the majority of them contain limited game elements and the main challenge is the annotation task itself. This paper presents the design, implementation and early evaluation of a human computation game for supporting creative advertising. The game is part of a larger project for data mining and content-based searching in a rich collection of video ads aiming to serve as a creativity support tool for advertisers. Its main aim is to have players populate an ontology whilst playing a multiplayer game that includes an action and a quiz gameplay mode. The game incorporates a variety of elements and challenges found in modern action games and uses a metaphor of rooms and collectible items to represent the ontology concepts in the game world. The pilot study results indicate that players found the concept interesting, but there is still room for improvements in the gameplay and appearance.