XTribe: a web-based social computation platform
Saverio Caminiti, Claudio Cicali, Pietro Gravino, Vittorio Loreto, Vito D. P. Servedio, Francesca Tria · 2014
In the last few years the Web has progres-sively acquired the status of an infrastruc-ture for social computation that allows re-searchers to coordinate the cognitive abilities of human agents in on-line communities so to steer the collective user activity towards pre-defined goals. This general trend is also trig-gering the adoption of web-games as a very interesting laboratory to run experiments in the social sciences and whenever the contribu-tion of human beings is crucially required for research purposes. Nowadays, while the num-ber of on-line users has been steadily growing, there is still a need of systematization in the approach to the web as a laboratory. In this paper we present Experimental Tribe (XTribe in short), a novel general purpose web-based platform for web-gaming and social computa-tion. Ready to use and already operational, XTribe aims at drastically reducing the ef-fort required to develop and run web exper-iments. XTribe has been designed to speed up the implementation of those general as-pects of web experiments that are indepen-dent of the specific experiment content. For example, XTribe takes care of user manage-ment by handling their registration and pro-files and in case of multi-player games, it pro-vides the necessary user grouping functionali-ties. XTribe also provides communication fa-cilities to easily achieve both bidirectional and asynchronous communication. From a prac-tical point of view, researchers are left with the only task of designing and implementing the game interface and logic of their exper-iment, on which they maintain full control. Moreover, XTribe acts as a repository of dif-ferent scientific experiments, thus realizing a sort of showcase that stimulates users ’ curios-ity, enhances their participation, and helps re-searchers in recruiting volunteers.1 1