Matching Game Mechanics and Human Computation Tasks in Games with a Purpose
Luca Galli · 2014
The massive amount of time that people spend in online gaming is being increasingly exploited by a particular kind of Serious Games, the Games with a Purpose (GWAP), used to solve complex problems as a byproduct of their gameplay. The design of the tasks and the choice of game mechanics able to solve them has been done so far without consolidated guidelines and with few considerations with respect to traditional game design princpiples. Without proper best practices to follow, the design of a GWAP may incur in increased development time and costs or even failures. This work attempts to solve these shortcomings for novel designers by providing: 1) a development process to follow when designing new GWAPs 2) the definition of the multimedia refinement tasks best suited to be solved with GWAPs and 3) the list of traditional game mechanics that best match these tasks.