Game Play

Zooke is a solution which attempts to help alleviate the problem of media asset management. By leveraging point of capture metadata available on mobile devices, as well as a community of networked users, Zooke provides a platform for users to annotate images. By distributing the annotation process among the community the annotation burden is alleviated and lessened for each individual, thus making it more likely that each user will participate in the process and collectively more images will become annotated. Zooke uses game play as incentive and motivation for users to engage in this annotation process, yet allows the process and annotation goal itself to remain transparent to the user. The game, instead, presents with a compelling way for users to creatively explore and
share their own real-life worlds with a community of engaged individuals. By bringing the user's world into the game, we create a rich imagery-centric interaction exploring social actions of individuals and communities and also create a reusable repository of user-verified annotated images for future use and distribution.

Note: Grey italics are works in progress, notes, or things we have not yet determined.

Tasks

Tasks can involve one of three types of actions:

1. Taking an image of something - person, place, object, or action.

   1. task is completed when x% players social group say task is completed. Population is asked if image fulfills task (yes/no question)

   2. reputation is affected by photo completion and level of task

2. Verifying that another player in the system has taken an appropriate picture (i.e., that it is annotated correctly.)

3. Ranking a task generated by another player.

4. Generating a task – creating and sending a tasks to players (for now we assume that players may assign a specific player a task)

Reputation

Each player will have a reputation. The reputation will be maintained by playing fairly and honestly. It is analogous to eBay’s reputation stars. However the player’s reputation will be determined on a set number of criteria:

1. Picture taking Good/Bad picture. How accurate they are in completing a task. If they take photos which are always verified by the community as matching their particular task, then they receive good rating, however, if their photos do not get verified within the community their reputation decreases and their picture is rated as bad.

2. Task verification Good/Bad. If all other players verify the photo and one player does not, then that player’s honesty will decrease, but, if that player verifies all photos correctly, as the community does, then his/her reputation increases. (We may want to make this two things??) How do we add subjectivity? We just know it exists. How about a forum for task completion?

3. Ranking task difficulty. How well they rank tasks compared to other players in the same level?

4. Creating good tasks?

Points: Points are gathered by completing tasks. The more tasks a player completes the more points a player accrues. Points are assigned to each task, based on the difficulty. They represent the accumulated task completion points.

For example:

Joe has the following reputation of 84% that is determined as:

Points are only assigned to photo challenge completion tasks. In the above axample, the 17 points resulted from the seven picture challence tasks completed with the following distribution:

3 tasks completed at difficulty level 1 resulting in 3 points
0 tasks completed at difficulty level 2 resulting in 0 points
2 tasks completed at difficulty level 3 resulting in 6 points
2 tasks completed at difficulty level 4 resulting in 8 points
0 tasks completed at difficulty level 5 resulting in 0 points

for a total of 17 points

Players are penalized for having bad reputations. Should their reputation not be satisfactory, then they may not advance to the next level. They must first remain within the level they are in for a longer time and complete more tasks until their reputation has increased enough to proceed. They keep receiving tasks until they increase their reputation.

Time:

When a task is generated there might be a time assigned for completing the task, but if the task is not completed within that time frame then no penalties awarded. This is because we do not have a way of determining when a task is taken by a player. When the time expires the task may disappear from the task list.

The goal of rating a task is to estimate how difficult the rest of the community will determine a task to be and assign a ranking to it. Only players who have completed level one (newbie) will be able to create new tasks. Upon creating a new task the player will submit the task. The system will then distribute the task for rating to members of the same level prioritizing to their social group. All player ratings will be averaged and that rank will be assigned to each task. Rating outliers both above and below the average, obviously have not studied their community well, and will therefore be penalized by decreasing their reputation.

Prove It: A player will have a chance to gain extra points by proving that they deem a task as very easy when the rest of the community rates it as hard. “Prove It” will give that player a chance to prove they can perform a difficult task, which they rated easy, in a prompt manner. A point boost (double points) will be given to an outlying who rates a task significantly easier than the rest of the community, yet is still able to complete the task. Should a “Prove It” situation occur and the user is unable to perform the task, then that player will loose more reputation than a normal player.

Verifying

Each player’s tasks are verified by the community. In order to verify, player 1 will receive a task that asks them to verify player 2’s task. By responding yes or no (or selecting the correct answer from a multiple choice list, or matching test, etc.), player 1 will verify player 2’s task entry. Should player 1 be an outlying player of the community for verification of player 2’s task, then player 1 will have unsuccessfully completed the verification task.

Only after a task has been verified, will it be submitted to the database and stored.

Annotation

Annotation is a two phase process. The first phase of annotation is the completion of a task by one player. The second phase is verification of that task by other players. By allowing for a correct verification process to occur, a validated annotation is ensured and all data stored in the database is deemed to be annotated correctly.

Community and Community Building

A player can either a member of a social group by either being invited to that social group or they can be a member of the social group of non-invited players or public social group. A community is defined by a social group. The sense of community and community development is a salient feature of this game. Players must monitor and watch their community. Therefore, they must have a sense of involvement with them.

When a player creates a task, the task will be assigned to players in their social group first (assignment of tasks will be prioritized to players in their social group) and then maybe to other players at the same level. The player can also choose to assign the task to a selected group of pseudonyms. The task is then assigned to these players as well as other players in their social group and to other players at the same level.

Multiple Communities: In this model communities are established, on any one of the following:

• free agent model

• level of play

• location and level of play

• an invitation system, much like friendster, where someone must invite you to join a community

Community involvement is the crux of this game. The community and ability to know who is in your community, by viewing profiles, collaborating on tasks, etc. will have a very large impact on how the game is played. For example in one model, you may be able to select players within the community to send a specific task to, but in another you will never know who is being sent your task.

The involvement of the community to the player is great. One model may represent players who would only like to play part time at their choice. The other, at time of sign up the player is automatically placed into a community and their life within the game begins from that time forward. They are playing at all times, even when they are not. They are always living in the community.

We are continuing to explore which model or mixture of models will make the most sense for this game and how we can effectively leverage the sense of community to make the game as easy, simple, and fun as possible.

Beginning of the game:

You can either get invited by another friend who is already playing or you can just generally sign up into the system. If you get invited into the game you are associated with to the player that invited you and indirectly associated to players they are associated to.

Demotion

Should a player fail to watch their community, participate in the community by sending tasks, or otherwise have their reputation drop to 25% full, then they will receive a warning notice. Should their reputation continue to fall to below 15%, then the player will be demoted to a prior level/community.

Promotion

When a player’s reputation has remained at XX% for quite sometime, then they will receive a notice of promotion to the next level. A player may, however, decline the promotion and remain playing at their current level.

Lurkers

Players that do not participate in the game and simply look at other players photos will be tagged as lurkers. Their reputation will drop to zero and they will have to consult a professional (maybe receive a task from a high player to rejoin the newbie community), in order to nullify their lurker status.

Bonus Tasks:

Tasks may also be assigned by the system or sponsors. These system or sponsor created tasks will be bonus tasks. The players may not only receive points in the game/ but also receive real world bonuses, such as t-shirts, getting entered into contests, etc. Privacy issues and release of copyright to the sponsor may also have to be addressed with sponsor related tasks. A system bonus task may give a player a way to gain double the points.

Multiplayer tasks?

Location-based tasks?

PC Component

There will be a component of the game which allows players to view their own (and others’) photos from a PC and continue game play as well. Players may decide to take photos via their camera phone and verify and rank photos via the PC. They will be able to browse profiles and photos of members of their community (and possibly other communities). They will be able to see what other members/communities have responded to tasks. They will also be able to view how their own tasks were responded to. (Users may be allowed to take photos with other devices, upload, and annotate via the browser.)

We think this will have a very unique effect of intriguing individuals to create tasks. Not only will they be able to continue to play as passive/observational players, but one can imagine if a designer was looking for inspiration on a certain subject matter and they entered that as a task. Within days or even hours, they may have 10 or 100s of responses to their one task. We believe that people, even without looking for inspiration, will just like to see other individual’s photos of something they tell them to photograph.

Added Value

At the completion of the game (or on running) a verified correctly annotated photo database will exist. The system will put all photos which did not get x% of verification into an unaccepted category and not add them to the database. This unaccepted category of photos could be later studied for game improvement. The rich value of this information would be of value to both sponsors and researchers. Privacy issues will have to be addressed, as to who owns these photos and who has access to them. Before signing up players may have to approve a privacy waiver.

What will we will create this term?

In the short term, the next few weeks, we will be mocking up (in paper or other low-fi mechanism) an initial screen concept of the phone interface and maybe the PC browser as well. We will also research previously made games of this sort, in order to explore ideas of community and strategy, as well as interaction mechanisms. Additionally we will be interviewing researchers who have previously explored mobile communities and social gaming to gain further knowledge in this arena. We will also research the annotation and metadata aspects of the game. We will look at the current annotation process both in Flamenco and MMM (Mobile Media Metadata) project to try to understand what are some of the lessons learned from those applications. We are proposing a distributed annotation approach as part of the game architecture. The system architecture will need to take this into account.

Preliminary Schedule and Work Distribution/ Roles for this term.

**Usability Testing and Iterations to ensue throughout the break