Lessons Learned from Video Game Players Sorting Genomes

Lessons Learned from Video Game Players Sorting Genomes

Lessons Learned from Video Game Players Sorting Genomes

Rogerio De Leon Pereira, Olivier Tremblay-Savard

Abstract

"The fields of human computing and citizen science have made a lot of progress in creating engaging applications and encouraging people to donate part of their time to solve problems that are difficult for computers but easy for them. One option that has been widely used in citizen science particularly is to transform the problem into smaller tasks that can be presented as a puzzle game. This way, volunteers can participate by playing a game and contribute to scientific advancement. This work presents the lessons learned from the citizen science game GeSort, with a focus on better understanding player strategies and puzzle difficulty. Matches played over one year were analyzed. We examined which player strategies led to optimal and sub-optimal solutions. We analyzed how certain repetitive patterns of shapes and colours could confuse players and cause mistakes. Moreover, we present a simple system for dynamically adjusting the difficulty in a puzzle game when an achievable score is known. Based on our results, we propose some design guidelines that can generally be applied to any puzzle game in order to alleviate the potential issues related to puzzle presentation and patterns."

Reference

De Leon Pereira, R., & Tremblay-Savard, O. (2023, April). Lessons learned from video game players sorting genomes. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 1-11). https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3582437.3582472

Keywords

Citizen Science, Puzzle Game, Player Strategies