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gameplay database; gameability resources?

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urlwolf:
I've realized that if I want to write some game-like experiments, the, I have to learn more about games. We are talking about extremely easy to implement stuff, not complicated 3D hyperrealistic shooters.

The basic idea is that people spend hundreds of hours on the net playing games. If we could use all that activity to test cognitive hypotheses, that'd be absolutely fantastic. Luis Von Hahn (CMU) has presented a fantastic video where he shows how one can use people playing activity to solve computationally hard problems.

Von Hann and Dabbish (2004) use an online game to solve computationally hard problems such as tagging pictures. Many people play over 40 hours a week, and when people play, they help determine the content of images on the Web by providing meaningful labels for them. They claim that if the game is played as much as other popular online games, all images on the Web can be labeled in just a few weeks. This approach is simple but novel and changes the way machine learning looks at the complex problem of image tagging. Human computation is yet another algorithm that can be optimized, for example, by improving the game. Presenting experiments as games could radically change both the amount and the quality of data collected to test cognitive theories.

Google has funded Luis, and has adapted the game to tag pictures for google indexing: they created a very interesting game for the very boring task of tagging pictures (http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/). 

The 'games' I'm thinking about are this simple.

I'm not a gamer. But I need to acquire a basic knowledge of what makes a task a game; what makes a game addictive; and what makes a game fun. All of these, while being simple.


To all people interested in game programming here...
Where do I start?

Is there any website about gameability (with simple recipes about how to create simple, addictive games)?

Any resources and pointers appreciated.

PS: Mouser, you are gonna love the video...

urlwolf:
I forgot. I'm also interested in simple games with an userbase already that keep the logs of lots of matches (or game history). Chess is a bit too complicated for this, but there must be other games that keep some kind of history and have large user communities.  Do you know any?

tinjaw:
You can start with:


* A Theory of Fun for Game Design  by Raph Koster
* Chris Crawford on Game Design  by Chris Crawford
* Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals  by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
Those should get your head wrapped around games in a good way. I'm in the "serious games" business and the little group I am a part of believe that the only thing that differs between a game and a simulation is the learning objective. If it is to learn something then it is a simulation, if it is to have fun, then it is a game. At first pass, I would imagine it is very similar when comparing computerized tasks to games.

urlwolf:
Thanks a lot tinjaw. That seems like a good state-of-the-art collection.
There is something that I'm thinking may sink my idea though. Most games have a component of randomness. This makes it difficult to compare two players strictly speaking (one may have been favored by the random environment)... this is true both for complex simulation-like things like the ones you mention, and for simple things like tetris.

hmm...

tinjaw:
There are many games that do not incorporate chance. Many puzzle games and the "choose your own adventure" type games come immediately to mind. Additionally I would assume that random chance might be fine if it is one of the variables you are looking at. For example, determining why people still don't understand that if you get heads 1,000,000 times in a row you still have a 50% chance of it coming up heads on the next flip. And chance is fine if it simply a matter of choosing between similar outcomes. For example did the actor exit stage right or stage left. It may be irrelevant to the outcome, but give that player some variety.

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