The last few years have seen a tremendous number of games hit the market that offer players the opportunity to improve society in addition to the usual fun associated with playing a good game.

Over the last few years, I’ve written about Eyewire (neuroscience), Phylo (DNA), Nanocrafter (DNA), Eterna and Nova (both of which tackle RNA), Reverse the Odds (Cancer), Fort McMoney (social cohesion), and no doubt many more that I’ve overlooked.

Gaming for biodiversity

It’s exciting to see biodiversity join the action, with the release of two games by Purposeful Gaming and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The games, called Smorball and Beanstalk, are designed to help BHL provide more comprehensive searching of digitized materials, all through the lens of a fun and engaging game.

The BHL has a wealth of content but a sizable chunk of it is not in screen readable format. Whilst OCR software has come a long way, there are still certain challenges involved in converting old books and documents to something usable. For instance, software understandably struggles with handwritten journals from the 19th century.

“The OCR outputs for those kinds of things are garbage,” the project team say. “Some of it, you can get partial OCR, but a lot of it has to be totally transcribed by individuals, by typing it all out.”

Getting the crowd involved

This is where the crowd come in. BHL have had success with crowdsourcing in the past, with volunteers helping out with things such as image tagging and transcription of field journals.

The hope is that the games will give these projects a major boost. In Beanstalk, the gameplay is purposefully simple. Players are tasked with successfully transcribing a short snippet of original digitized text. Each successful transcription makes the beanstalk grow a little further.

Smorball is slightly more advanced, in that it adds a time element to affairs. This time, players are tasked with transcribing as quickly and as accurately as they can, with scores compared with other players in the fictional sport of Smorball.

In both games, the input provided by the players are used to double-check existing transcriptions. In the early stages the players will be given well-vetted transcriptions to test the accuracy of players, but over time this may change.

“For the inputs that have been used in the games, there have been a set group of texts that were really closely vetted, so that we know exactly what each word says, exactly how everything was supposed to be spelled,” the team say. “So when we put those materials into the games for testing, when someone enters the wrong word, or even the wrong character within a word, we can know that it’s wrong.”

It’s a nice example of how games can provide a useful medium by which to engage interested parties in small yet valuable tasks. It will be fascinating to see how the project evolves and how accurate the players turn out to be.