Point systems

Feature Requests
#1

Some of this is a repeat from a chat I had with echo this morning.

What do your dedicated gamers want? They want recognition for their talents and efforts. They want to earn insider status in the community, and maybe build some relationships with other gamers and paid staff. And they want feedback to help them get better at tracking’ dem neurons.

What does Eyewire, the organization want? They want neurons mapped. They want community participation, and they want to learn how to do this stuff better and more efficiently, so we can tackle the big brain cells.

I’m goin’ to sketch a picture, and if y’all want to help me fill it in, that’s tickety-boo!

  1. players know upfront if they’ve got a trailblazer cube or a known-points cube.

  2. Players can earn points three ways. Instant points for correctly mapping known neurons. Accuracy points. And Marshmallow Points.

  3. They’re called Marshmallow points for two reasons. One is because they’re squishy. The other is after Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow test of ability to delay gratification. The third is because an icon of a marshmallow is easy to draw and doesn’t take much space. See, you didn’t know that third reason was coming, and then it just showed up! That’s how Marshmallow Points act. You take on a Trailblazer Cube, and you don’t know how many points you’re going to get for it until they just show up. That’s delayed gratification. And if we couldn’t delay gratification, we wouldn’t be doing this game.

  4. So as you earn accuracy points and marshmallow points, you move up in the community. As you move up, your rights and responsibilities expand. One feature I suggested for everybody that’s finished the basic tutorial is the ability to flag a cube and have a more experienced player look at it. I’d like higher level players to be able to spend marshmallow points on specific feedback to the player from an expert, about a cube that they choose. It’s possible that this could also help us identify levels of difficulty.

  5. When I lived in Taiwan, I used to look at the teeth of the cab driver, estimate how many betel nuts he’d chewed that day, and gauge my chances of arriving at my destination alive. Well, more experienced players look at a cube and estimate their chances of finding some good new pipeline out of it in a similar way. Occasionally, we are wrong and then surprised.

But sorting cubes on first sight could be an activity earned by a combination of accuracy and grunt work. . Grunt work meaning trailblazing cubes that have been sorted into a low probability category, with major marshmallow points when you do find something. For the purpose of discussion, let’s call the categories Promising, Slug Patches, and Snowball’s Chance. Promising cubes and Snowball’s Chance cubes with major marshmallow discoveries could be fast-tracked for development into Instant Point rounds, which will help train everybody to do this job better. Slug Patches and Snowball’s Chance cubes with no surprises could be fast-tracked to early retirement, to make the game more interesting.

What do y’all think?

#2
@beckeemo
I think these are all great ideas! Your idea to have (potentially) higher-worth marshmallow points for trailblazing is a great incentive.

Also, having an 'expeditor' of sorts to figure out what areas probably need work is something we hadn't considered before, I think it has a lot of potential if we can figure out the right tools for the job.


There were two great ideas put forth in the chat yesterday which solve the same problem

@beckeemo suggested we alternate between trailblazer cubes and non-trailblazer cubes, so the user knows that at least every-other cube they will be awarded real points.

@auntdeen suggested that we have two game modes, one for everyone where they can trace non-trailblazer cubes, the other for 'experts' to trace the frontier.

Both of these solve the issue of randomly not-getting-any-points, which is great. I like @beckeemo's solution because it ensures we will always have people available to trace the frontier. I like @auntdeen's solution because we can be more confident about the correctness of the frontier with fewer people, since those first people will be 'experts'.

Keep the ideas coming! These conversations have been very productive in thinking about the direction of the site.
#3

OK, I just had a flash of insight. Let’s say a player plays ten known points cubes, then does 5 trailblazers. Doesn’t it make sense to take the players known points per known cube, and give them their average number of points every time they trailblaze a cube? Yes, they might get too many points for this cube, and too few for that cube, but we can assume that their total scores would be really close to what it would be if every cube were counted.

#4

Although I understand where you are coming from with the idea and I also believe that the trailblazers would be helpful I think the point system you have suggested needs some work, I do think having the higher form of incentive is a good idea but how that incentive is received been the issue. 


First off you must look at the psychology of a gamer the majority of which are present orientated and delaying the gratification, I believe, would not be as useful as you think. 

One of the reasons games feel so compelling is the instant feed back given to the player allowing them to see how they are progressing right then and there, by delaying the gratification and giving the points sometime later it will disconnect the feeling of getting the points and progressing.

Thank you for your time, any thoughts on this?
#5

To my mind, this is one of the most challenging parts of making a game with a purpose.  Games are all about positive feedback and reinforcement.  As you say @golion, it’s important that there is very little delayed gratification.


The problem is that if you are trying to accomplish something else with your game, sometimes your goal interferes with making that nice tight feedback loop that you want.  In our case, this dichotomy presents itself as an inability to properly reward players in real time.  I think there will have to be some sort of delay of gratification.

That having been said, I’m not too worried.  To give an example of a game that I’ve been playing recently, “Diablo 3,” The rewards are punctuated and random.  I sometimes play hours without finding anything good.  But it’s all made right when eventually that good item drops.  Also, with RPGs in general, there is a notion of building a character over time.  That may be a small more frequent reward, but the notion is that it is building with each level and will eventually make you powerful.

How does that translate to our game?  Well I think we need to emphasize the long game more with smaller periodic rewards.  I think we need to focus on global progress, while reminding our users how much they individually (or small groups of them) have contributed.  And I do think that there is a reward to be had coming back later to see how some of your earlier tasks went.  It’s a great way to keep people coming back.  Zynga and others have basically built whole businesses around the notion that if you as people to do something and tell them to come back later to see how they did, they will do it in droves.  Not that I want to make a Zynga-like game, but I definitely think there are mechanics for us to explore and that eventually we can find a good mix that works for us while still doing useful science!
#6

Well you already have a key motivator in the game which is that players are playing for the goal of a higher purpose, rewards such as points, badges and ladder systems can trivialize the inherent intrinsic reward of doing something for good.


 You seem to be focusing on the much less effective extrinsic reward systems, if you look closely enough at “Diablo 3” at some point in the game when your high enough level and items that let you defeat monsters in all difficulties with ease it just becomes a glorified slot machine with time as the currency you insert; playing for hours without finding anything good and then right before that point when you are going to give up you get a reward and are motivated to keep chasing after the next shiny trinket.

Then on to Zynga appointment based games, these games are good for a short but large burst of players if you get the formula right, but they also run off this points,badges and ladder system although the ladder system works better because it only matches you with your friends so you don’t see the person with some ridiculous score that you can never hope to beat that will demotivate players, a better way would be to make the game features more unique or something not experienced that are also science related.

I think a much more unique system would be better for this game in specific, focusing on the subject at hand which is neuroscience mainly but science in general.


#7

Well, suggesting that players are rewarded for Trailblazing a new cube with a number of points equal to their average performance on known cubes was a way to deal with the delayed gratification issue.


As a teacher, I know full well the value of intrinsic motivation for the general population. The points awarded here and at, say, Yahoo answers are purely symbolic, and that acts a little differently on the psyche than tangible rewards. 
#8

@golion I wasn’t trying to suggest that we should imitate either of those examples.  Your analysis of them is spot on.  I was just trying to suggest that longer term rewards can be motivating to.  I agree that we need to do something unique.  We’ve got a few ideas we’re working on, but again, are always open to suggestions.

#9

I understand the need of a scoring system that can entice the greatest possible number of people to participate. However do not forget the group (a minority?) of participants, I believe that I’m part of this,  does not consider essential to achieve high scores but which finds its motivation in scientific research and education. See the case of Zooniverse projects where many projects are followed by a large number of people with no score (the last Cell Slider).

Ciao

Mario


P.S. I am a retired Italian headmaster; I’m 63 years old and a lot of free time.

P.P.S. BTW The elders in the field of citizen science are strong :-); point out the two citizen scientists Robert Gagliano (68 years old) and Jek Kian (53 years old) in the Zooniverse project Planet Hunters have discovered a distant planet (PH1) 5000 light years away from Earth.

#10

Yeah, great comment!   We are definitely trying to do things in such a way that we maintain our scientific integrity.  We definitely don’t want to turn this into a gimmicky silly web game.

#11

How about retroactively awarding points to the trailblazers once more people have traced the respective cubes? You could show these points the next time the user logs in. This would also help in making users come back regularly because they want to collect their trailblazing points.

#12

Not a bad idea.  We’ll think about it.