Games with a Purpose for Social Networking Platforms

Abstract

The online games market has matured in recent years. It is now a multi-billion dollar business with hundreds of millions players worldwide. At the same time, social networking platforms have witnessed unprecedented growth rates and increasingly offer developer interfaces to leverage and extend their built-in core functionality. Benefiting from these trends, games with a purpose are a proven way of leveraging the wisdom of the crowds to address tasks that are trivial for humans but still not solvable by computer algorithms in a satisfying manner. This paper presents an application framework to develop interactive games with a purpose on top of social networking platforms, suitable for deployment in both mobile and Web-based environments. A set of analytic tools helps to evaluate the results and to pre-process the gathered data for use in external applications.