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Is Virtual Citizen Science A Game?

Published: 27 June 2018 Publication History

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.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Social Computing
ACM Transactions on Social Computing  Volume 1, Issue 2
June 2018
102 pages
EISSN:2469-7826
DOI:10.1145/3234932
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 27 June 2018
Accepted: 01 April 2018
Revised: 01 April 2018
Received: 01 June 2017
Published in TSC Volume 1, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Citizen science
  2. engagement
  3. gamification
  4. motivation
  5. social computing

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  • Theory and Practice of Social Machines
  • Stars4All EUHorizon 2020 Framework Programme
  • Digital Economy programme
  • Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council on behalf of UK Research and Innovation
  • UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) SOCIAM

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