More than data gatherers: exploring player experience in a citizen science game
- PDF / 1,077,731 Bytes
- 19 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 15 Downloads / 218 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
More than data gatherers: exploring player experience in a citizen science game Carlos Díaz1 · Marisa Ponti2 · Pinja Haikka1 · Rajiv Basaiawmoit3 · Jacob Sherson4 Received: 12 April 2019 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Abstract We present the results of an exploratory player experience study on the game Quantum Moves, a citizen science game where players move quantum particles to help create a quantum computer. Eight-hundred-and-seventeen players responded to a 13-question exploratory survey constructed to understand how players relate to the game, what are their motivations, and how could the game be improved. We analyzed the data using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. Specifically, the thematic analysis helped identifying two cross-cutting themes amongst the players: (a) learning and (b) the opportunity to contribute to science. Results indicate that the opportunity to help science, along with game design, game elements, involvement of players with the scientific community, and players’ strategies influence experience. Implications of the particular findings for the research on player experience on citizen science games and development of evaluation methods are discussed. Keywords Citizen science · Games with a purpose · Player experience · Quantum physics
Introduction Citizen science is established on the involvement of volunteers in scientific research with the goal of increasing the scope, scale, or diversity of scientific practices [1]. However, the sustainability of citizen science depends on the degree to which members of the public are interested and provide continued contributions. As such, one of the biggest challenges in citizen science is recruiting and retaining sufficient participants to achieve a project’s goals. Participation in citizen science varies greatly across projects and platforms, but
* Carlos Díaz [email protected] 1
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Aarhus, Ny Munkegade 120, Building 1522, Room 324, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
2
Department of Applied Information Technology, University of Gothenburg, Forskningsgången 6, 412 96 Göteborg, Sweden
3
Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Aarhus, Ny Munkegade 120, Building 1530, Room 233, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
4
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Aarhus, Ny Munkegade 120, Building 1522, Room 312, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
projects can be at risk to be cancelled if they cannot reach a critical mass or keep their volunteers engaged [2]. Within the citizen science community, several researchers including Newman et al. [3] and Sørensen et al. [4] have pointed to games as an opportunity for doing citizen science. While the existent literature has mainly examined motivation, quality of player contributions, aspects related to content learning and education, and system/task design in online citizen science games [5], both player experience (PX) and quality of experience (QoE) of games of this type appears to be under explored. In this paper, we
Data Loading...
