Gamify Competition Results

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Contents

How Would You Gamify SETI?

Competition Review and Winner Selection

By: Jon Richards
Senior Software Engineer at The SETI Institute
July 28, 2011

Overview

http://SETI.org and http://Gamify.com together created an EPIC Contest to explore possible ways to gamify SETI. We asked the most brilliant Earthlings to come up with ideas on how to apply gamification to increase participation in the SETI program.

Visit http://meta.gamify.com/questions/13/how-would-you-gamify-seti for a full explanation of the competition and the ideas people submitted.

Please see Gamify Competition for our introduction to the competition.

Discuss on the forum topic: http://setiquest.org/forum/topic/gamify-experimentation

The contest ended July 4, 2011. Here I review the ideas people suggested and select the winners of the competition.

Participants

We had 22 participants in the competition.

If there was an award for the best user name, “maxs_pooper_scooper” would win it. He has commented some on the setiQuest.org site and his name has garnered a few chuckles from the engineering staff.

Thanks to all who participated!

Ideas Overview

The ideas presented fell into 3 general categories.

Science Fiction schemes

These involved capturing the attention of the player by presenting the game in a science fiction landscape. Flying around, and encountering the waterfall data as the game is played.

Data Viewers

These involved having the player view the waterfall data and try to see signals.

Simplified Games

These are like Tetris or Mr Giggles. A game that solves the problem without actually having the player know what the data really is.

Other ideas

  1. Representing the data as audio.
  2. Try to attract the “radio listening” community, such as shortwave listeners, hams, police radio listeners, that kind of crowd.
  3. Make a card game.


Culling Through the Ideas

Most of the ideas were great. Exactly what I asked for. They made me think a lot about the problem in ways I had not before. My thoughts I formed here are a result of contemplating the submitted ideas.

JeffZ thought we should not try to dumb down the problem. Maybe many are of this opinion? I humbly disagree, due to my experiences that I'll explain.

The problem of sorting through waterfall data can only be solved if we have a lot of people working on it. Continually. This will only be possible if we can attract the attention of the non-technical populace.

I've been working on SETI's setiQuest program for almost 2 years now. This has been an eye opening experience trying to spread the word of SETI. I've learned that a lot of the people interested in SETI have eyes that quickly start to glaze over when I try to explain what the waterfall data is. I think that my previous view of what should be explainable to a mass of people has been tainted by the fact that I've lived in engineering circles for the last umpteen years and people I talk with tend to talk technical things. But try to explain the technicalities of a setiQuest Data waterfall to my sister, who is a very smart woman, and she will not understand. No matter how much I have tried to explain the data and waterfall to my kids, they have no idea what it is.

So, I believe that the gamification process we come up with should be as far removed from the problem as feasible so we do not have to spend a lot of effort educating.

The game suggestions for space or science fiction/spaceship gamescapes sound intriguing, probably would be, but in the end it ties the waterfall data to the technical aspect of the waterfall data. The science of understanding the data, the data source, and signal characteristics would involve an education. Some people might not get it.

Several months ago I broke down and finally bought Angry Birds for my iPhone. I discovered that I was immediately immersed in the game. All the education that was required was the little animation at the beginning that shows the dirty rotten scoundrel pigs stealing those eggs.

I do not know if we should try to get down to the level of Angry Birds. But I think we should first try to make something simple.

I best liked the idea by romrack. He suggested something I never thought of before; try to make a game like Tetris or Mr. Giggles. He summed up his ideas in a blog at http://romrack.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/quest-how-would-you-gamify-seti-braincue-has-a-cue/. He suggested we break up the waterfall image into squares and pseudo-color them and plop them down sort of like Tetris, till you see a signal.

Gamify-romrack-game-idea.png
Romrack's idea for a Tetris like game

I actually have my doubts that pseudo-coloring the waterfall data in this manner could be done effectively. I think it may hide too much detail and obscure any actual signals. But I think some scheme around this idea may work. Maybe really small squares? Maybe we do not color them at all, but chop the waterfall images into squares and paint the squares in random order till the user sees a signal and they get points for how fast and accurately they see a signal. Experimentation needs to be done.

I would like to further this idea of creating a really simple game a 6 year old would like as well as the older folks. This would involve a lot of experimenting to get just the right method of displaying the waterfall data. Maybe romrack's idea as is would work? Or we have to work on some other related scheme. I think we could learn a lot from experimenting around this idea. On top of this idea I think we can gamify our problem to attract the most people and get the most consistent results.

Ohtravioso mentioned sonification, or turning the waterfalls into sound. This may be useful to add an extra dimension to the process, if only to add some extra behavior to the game when a person sees something. This could beinteresting.

The Winner

I choose romrack for his idea of creating a simpler game like Tertris or Mr. Giggles. Congratulations romrack!

Honorable Mentions

Conclusion

Thanks to all who participated and for the awesome team at Astro Gaming (http://astrogaming.com) for sponsoring the contest! I hope you all got to http://setiQuest.org and see if you can help the search.

Lets discuss on the forum topic: http://setiquest.org/forum/topic/gamify-experimentation

Resources

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