Museum Games and UGC: Improving Collections Through PlayMia Ridge, Open University, @mia_out

Overview

• The magic circle (and other definitions)• About MMG (Museum Metadata Games)• Benefits of museum crowdsourcing games• Best practice in crowdsourcing game design

The magic circle (and other definitions...)

‘flow’

Gamification?

“taking the thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience”

“a short-term sugar rush of engagement followed by a crash”

“emphasizes the shallow, dumb, non-interesting tasks, and it decreases motivation for interesting tasks that might be intrinsically motivated.”

About ‘Museum Metadata Games’

'difficult' objects:technical, near-duplicate, poorly catalogued or scantily digitised

'toy' model steam engines, Powerhouse Museum

• In evaluation period: 6039 tags (2232 unique tags), average 18 tags per object

• Average time on site over 7 minutes, 6.5 pages per visit

• But - visitors via Facebook averaged 10 minutes and over 8 pages per visit

One Facebook status update asking for players:

180 turns (176 tagging turns, 4 fact turns), 1179 tags and 4 facts about 145 objects

from 26 players in c. 6 hours

Crowdsourcing games work

e.g. correcting OCR for libraries with DigitalKoot, Finland, one month after launch: 'over 2 million individual tasks, totalling 100,000 minutes, or 1,700 hours, of work'

GWAP, 2008: 50 million verified tags

Games are 'participation engines'

Games demolish barriers to participationGames drive on-going participationGames encourage super-taggersGames provide lavish feedback and rewards for effort

Benefits of museum crowdsourcing games

• The magic circle works• You make the rules - design for the data you

need• New forms of engagement with collections• Games encourage informal content that

bridges the ‘semantic gap’

Museum crowdsourcing games are

good at:Mental challenge

Mystery, curiosity, discovery

Novelty (sorta)

Instant gameplay

Epic meaning, blissful productivity

Infinite gameplay

not-so-good at:Mastery - how to teach skills, scaffold the learning experience, provide meaningful feedback?

Flow – needs variable difficulty; balance between boredom and anxiety

Help win the competition for eyeballs (AKA competing for 'participation bandwidth')

Design for instant action, gratificationBuild instructions and requirements into gameplayReward on-going play Don't require registrationValidate procrastination – help people feel good about

playingPolish is vital – 'worthy' isn't good enough

More lessons learned

Design for flow e.g variable levels of difficultyFun is personal - design for a specific player

persona, test with real audiencesQuality of feedback and scoring systems

countsHelp players acquire, test and master new

skills

Ecosystem of games

• Engage a wider range of players• Simple games help clean and test

data for use in other games• Validate and rate specialist content

from complex tasks• Be creative - e.g. crowdsource the

matching of activities to objects

Potential game 'atoms'

•Tagging•Debunking•Recording a personal story•Linking •Stating preferences •Categorising•Creative responses

Dealing with problem data?

Thank you!

Questions?

Mia Ridge@mia_outGames: http://museumgam.es/Blog: http://openobjects.blogspot.com