GWAPs: Games with a problem.
Kathleen Tuite · 2014
Figure 1: Games with a purpose (center) should fit between skilled professions (left) and simplistic micro-work that uses people as human-processing units (right). Games with a purpose should not seek to ‘gamify’ uninteresting tasks that are already easily crowdsourced, but to facilitate complex, collaborative, and creative and skilled work. Games with a purpose (gwaps) are expensive and challeng-ing to create, yet are touted as a cure-all for getting people to do uninteresting and repetitive tasks in exchange for fun and entertainment. Not only are poorly-executed gwaps in-effective for their purposes, but they can potentially under-mine future gwaps by burning out players and discouraging potential gwap supporters and investors. The goal of this paper is to challenge the role of gwaps as tools for disguising boring work as entertainment. We discuss recommendations for future gwap designs that are informed both by commer-cial game design and by parallel developments in paid crowd work.