Is Virtual Citizen Science A Game?

Abstract

The use of game elements within virtual citizen science is increasingly common, promising to bring increased user activity, motivation and engagement to large-scale scientific projects. However there is an ongoing debate about whether or not gamifying systems such as these is actually an effective means by which to increase motivation and engagement in the long term. While gamification itself is receiving a large amount of attention, there has been little beyond individual studies to assess its suitability or success for citizen science; similarly, while frameworks exist for assessing citizen science performance, they tend to lack any appreciation of the effects that game elements might have had. We therefore review the literature to determine what the trends are regarding the performance of particular game elements or characteristics in citizen science, and survey existing projects to assess how popular different game features are. Investigating this phenomenon further, we then present the results of a series of interviews carried out with the EyeWire citizen science project team to understand more about how gamification elements are introduced, monitored and assessed in a live project. Our findings suggest that projects use a range of game elements with points and leaderboards the most popular, particularly in projects that describe themselves as 'games'. Currently, gamification appears to be effective in citizen science for maintaining engagement with existing communities, but shows limited impact for attracting new players.

Crowd science infused learning

“…Gamification is viewed as a powerful design technique that has the ability to improve user experience and transform mundane, repetitive tasks into engaging experiences (Franzoni & Sauermann, 2014), thereby motivating and retaining participants (Bowser et al, 2013;Bowser et al, 2014;Iacovides et al, 2013;Pedersen et al, 2017). Such game elements include for example rewards, online gaming badges, leaderboards, or competitions (Simperl et al, 2018). Gamification may encourage people to take part in a project or help to sustain engagement, or both (Rotman et al, 2012;Simperl et al, 2018).…”

“…Such game elements include for example rewards, online gaming badges, leaderboards, or competitions (Simperl et al, 2018). Gamification may encourage people to take part in a project or help to sustain engagement, or both (Rotman et al, 2012;Simperl et al, 2018). Similarly, communication tools and community elements may help to sustain engagement over time, by allowing participants to interact through recognizing their achievements as meaningful (Iacovides et al, 2013;Tinati et al, 2016).…”

Improving the Results of Citizen Science Projects Through Reputation Systems: The Case of Wolf’s Number Experiment

“…In Table 1, it can be observed that more than 80% of users belong to the first group and also covered a total of 1,492 of the images analyzed, which represents 70% of the total. These indicators reflect, although it is not relevant in the validation of the method, that most users leave the experiment promptly, after few executions, mainly because the experiment needs to be improved to be more attractive to users, through gamification techniques that motivate or reward them, as proposed by [37] [38].…”

SpaceMaze: incentivizing correct mobile crowdsourced sensing behaviour with a sensified minigame

“…Simultaneously looking at the quality of the collected data has received less attention (Budde et al, 2017a;Simperl, Reeves, Phethean, Lynes, and Tinati, 2018). Prestopnik, Crowston, and Wang (2014) showed that games with a purpose can in principle yield contributions of equal quality.…”