Achivy provides you to see your and your friends’:

• Achievement “badges”
• Achievement levels and scores
• Top and recent users for all applications
• Progress bars and analytics to see how close you are to complete your tasks that encourages you to earn new badges
• Challenge with your friends
• You can even have some gifts and join loyalty programmes.

They will be releasing their API (http://achivy.com/c/api) soon

The e-programme technology provider is Microtask, whose automated platform splits dull repetitive tasks into tiny microtasks and distributes them over the internet. Once carried out by interested microworkers around Finland or around the world, Microtask puts the results back together into a completed assignment.

You can find all the information at http://www.nationallibrary.fi/infoe/uutiset/1297236955390.html

You can find all the information at http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=121936851206938&sk=info

That’s why Gameful have created a “secret HQ” for people who are making games that are making us:

• happier
• smarter
• stronger
• healthier
• more collaborative
• more creative
• better connected to our friends and family
• and better at WHATEVER we love to do when we’re not playing games

Here are some games that are already doing just that: EVOKE, Fold It!, The Epic Win App, Flower, Code of Everand, SuperBetter, The MP Expenses Game, Budgetball, the Pokéwalker, Quest to Learn, Little Big Planet: Gamechangers, World Without Oil, Seek ‘n Spell, Goal Mafia,and Conspiracy for Good.

What all of these projects have in common: they’re dedicated to making some kind of a real positive impact on gamers’ lives and the world around them.

Gameful is an online “Secret HQ” where you can connect with other people who believe in the power of games to make us better and change the world.

You can find all the information at http://gameful.org

Players are not only scored and ranked based on how much they play; they are scored by nature, depending on how well their virtual designs can be rendered as real, physical molecules. An additional incentive for users to participate in the game – beside the one of being able to contribute to real scientific research – is provided by the integration of the game with Facebook. Players can there talk about the game, post their accomplishments and compete with each other.

Read more about it at: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2011/January/jan11_eterna.shtml

The purpose is the evaluation of some heuristics that are used to determine a ranking of facts within a knowledge base such as e.g. DBpedia.

You can find the whole blog entry at http://moresemantic.blogspot.com/2010/11/who-knows-semantic-web-game.html

Future updates are going to introduce badges so that users will get badges depending on their use of Google’s email client.

Definitely a nice way of encouraging users to put good email management habits into practice

Game Mechanics are a means of rewarding users. They aren’t a great fit for everyone. Here are some of the characteristics the people behind IActionable have found that are a natural fit for accelerated growth through game mechanics:

• You have a community or are social where users are aware of each other.
• There are many ways a user can interact with your application or with each other.
• Ideally your users visit repeatedly; generally once a week or more.

Here are some of the basic building blocks they work with:

• Points: Do something good, get a few points. Do something great – get a lot of points. Do something bad? Lose points. It’s a concept we are all familiar with. Provide users with immediate feedback by adjusting their points – but be careful – it’s a powerful tool and you can easily find your users doing exactly what you reward them for. When used properly points can provide context within a site so user’s can quickly identify members who have been around for a while and are experienced members of the community.
• Achievements: Achievements are milestones or goals that, once accomplished, rewards users visibly, letting them and everyone else that they’ve “unlocked” that achievement. While points are great for smaller tasks, achievements are good for grander accomplishments and are seen as a source of pride for users. They usually appear in a list of “locked” and “unlocked” achievements. This provides an easy way for users to see what they can do to unlock more achievements and helps educate them about the possibilities your application offers.

All these capabilities are exposed by means of a REST API.

You can find all the information at the IActionable website at http://iactionable.com/.

Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research.

The current series of Science Puzzles, the Grand Challenges, are meant to generate the evidence needed to prove that human protein folders can be more effective than computers at certain aspects of protein structure prediction. That’s what all the puzzles in Foldit are about right now: predicting the structure of a protein based on its amino acid sequence.

For protein structure prediction, the eventual goal is to have human folders work on proteins that do not have a known structure. This would require first attracting the attention of scientists and biotech companies and convincing them that the process is effective. Another goal is to take folding strategies that human players have come up with while playing the game, and automate these strategies to make protein-prediction software more effective. These two goals are more or less independent and either or both may happen.

The more interesting goal for Foldit, perhaps, is not in protein prediction but protein design. Designing new proteins may be more directly practical than protein prediction, as the problem you must solve as a protein designer is basically an engineering problem (protein engineering), whether you are trying to disable a virus or scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It’s also a relatively new field compared to protein prediction. There aren’t a lot of automated approaches to protein design, so Foldit’s human folders will have less competition from the machines.

You can learn more about the science of Foldit here: The Science Behind Foldit.

• Dr. Iyad Rahwan, Masdar Institute& MIT (www.mit.edu/~irahwan)
• Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland, MIT (http://web.media.mit.edu/~sandy)

The successful candidate will work on a collaborative interdisciplinary research project. The project , titled “Influencing Collective Human Behavior Using Distributed Intelligent Systems,” aims to help people use resources more efficiently. The project will have (1) a theoretical component focusing on game-theoretic and incentive mechanism design issues, and (2) an empirical component to test these techniques in behavioral experiments using lab experiments and real deployment through mobile computing and sensor technologies.

For further details, please see: http://www.mit.edu/~irahwan/docs/20100529_postdoc_advert.pdf

Co-located with the 7th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2010)
as part of the SemWiki 2010 workshop.

30th May – 3rd June, 2010, Heraklion, Greece
http://www.eswc2010.org/

Deadline for submission: 09.04.2010 (12.00 AM, GMT)

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Awards

Win attractive prizes at the INSEMTIVES Game Idea Challenge!

• 1st Prize: iPhone
• 2nd Prize: iPod Nano
• 3rd Prize: iPod Shuffle

Summary

Useful semantic content cannot be created fully automatically, but motivating people to contribute to this process remains challenging. Our project INSEMTIVES revisits fundamental design issues of semantic-content authoring tools in order to find out which incentives speak to people to become engaged with the Semantic Web, and to determine ways in which such mechanisms can be transferred into technology design. Hiding the technicalities of knowledge engineering, semantic annotation and data integration behind captivating, entertaining games seems to be a promising approach to achieve this goal.

As part of the INSEMTIVES game challenge we are looking for colorful, innovative ideas with a twist for new “games with a purpose”. The purpose, of course, is primarily the creation of useful semantic content, but there are no bounds to your creativity. To get some inspiration, you can have a look at some of our games: OntoPronto and OntoTube, which are about the development and population of an ontology, and the semantic annotation of video content, respectively. Other relevant topics could include the annotation of text, music files, photo collections, but also the interlinking of RDF data sets, their curation, the alignment of data sources, or any other aspect that facilitates the uptake of the Semantic Web.

Format

The ideas should be submitted in PDF format per email to games@sti2.at. The text should not exceed five pages and follow the outline below:

• Overview:

             What Semantic Web-related aspect will this game solve? What will attract people to play this game? What is innovative in your idea?

• Game description:

             Explain the game scenario: Is it a multi-players or a single-player game? Is there any time restriction? What is the target of the game? What makes your game entertaining? How do you prevent cheating?

• Screen mocks or sketches of the game:

              How will your game look like? Describe the game interface and provide some pictures, either as screenshots or as hand-made sketches.

• Semantic content creation:

             Explain how the game creates semantic content, that is, how user inputs are translated into RDF(S), OWL etc.

• Validation:

              Explain how can you test whether the semantic content that the game creates is useful.

Review Process

The submitted game ideas will be reviewed by 3 reviewers according to its novelty, entertainment and Semantic Web-related impact value. The awards ceremony will be held at the European Semantic Web Conference as part of the SemWiki 2010 workshop.

Reviewers

• Pierre Andrews, University of Trento, Italy
• Roberta Cuel, University of Trento, Italy
• Carl Goodman, Pepper’s Ghost Productions, UK
• Elena Simperl, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
• Katharina Siorpaes, STI Innsbruck, Austria
• Germán Toro del Valle, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo
• Torben Wiedenhöfer, University of Siegen, Germany
•  Ilya Zaihrayeu, University of Trento, Italy
• Marco Zamarian, University of Trento, Italy

Important Dates

• Deadline for submissions: 09.04.2010 (12.00 AM, GMT)
• Notification of the winners: 23.04.2010
• ESWC2010 conference: 30.05 – 03.06.2010
• Awards ceremony: 31.05.2010, co-located with the SemWiki workshop

Contact Information

Katharina Siorpaes
STI Innsbruck, Austria
Email: katharina.siorpaes@sti2.at

The game was developed by Microsoft’s researchers Chris Quirk and Raman Chandrasekar, researchers from Georgia Tech and the Chinese University of Hong Kong and was presented to the public at the conference “SIGIR 2009” in Boston. More information about the game you can find on this page:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/23898/

It is stated that the researchers have already got some interesting results. One of them – they found the correlation between the number of characters in URL and the difficulty to match this page with the appropriate search queries.

The “Page Hunt” game exploits “human computation” and is interesting from this point of view to our INSEMTIVES project, where we try to develop funny and entertaining “games with a purpose” (in the style of Luis von Ahn)  for developing the Semantic Web.