OntoGame: Games for Creation of Semantic Content
From the about page:
OntoGame’s goal is to build games that can be used to create semantic content, a process that often can not be solved automatically but requires the help of humans. Games are a good way to wrap up and hide this complex process of semantic content creation and can attract a great number of people.
If you are tired of over-engineered interfaces for semantic annotation of content with menus, context sensitive help that you can’t turn off, and dizzying choices for ever step, you will find OntoGame a refreshing step in another direction.
Current games include:
- Tubelink
- Seafish
- SpotTheLink
- OntoPronto
- OntoTube
Tubelink and Seafish are single player games so I tried both of those.
Tubelink is an interesting idea, a video plays and you select tags for items that appear in the video and place them in a crystal ball. Placing the tags in the crystal ball at the time the item appears in the video results in more points. Allegedly (I never got this far) if you put enough tags in the crystal ball it bursts and you go to the next level. All I ever got was a video of a car stereo with a very distracting sound track. A button to skip the current video would be a useful addition.
Seafish has floating images, some of which are similar to a photo you are shown on the lower right. You have to separate the ones that are similar from those that are not by “catching” them and placing them in separate baskets. The thumbnail images enlarge when you hover over them.
Neither one of them is “Tetris” nor “Grand Theft Auto IV“, but gaming for the sake of gaming has developed over decades. Gaming for a useful purpose should be encouraged. It will catch up soon enough.