Great Flight is a game that aims at gathering data through gamification. During the game, the player will connect words that are then used to clean a semantic network. When the game was completed I created a test to improve both the player experience and the quality of the data gathered. Before you keep reading, you may want to play the game, the download is available at the bottom of the page; knowing how the test works will compromise it! The general idea is that a game will provide some tests to the player but it's not possible to evaluate the quality of the data received, otherwise there would be no purpose to ask the player to clean the data. So, before the player is allowed access to the dirty data, some known data are sent to the player to evaluate his ability as a cleaner.

The clean data to test the player are gathered from the poll of data and they form the Correction Highlight, which can be both manually or automatically derived by known/clean data already available. If the player is playing accordingly, the Trust will increase and a player with a high Trust will receive dirt data to clean. This system is based on a principle of game design, the so-called Player Behavior. The Player Behavior represents the way a player plays a game, every time the player find a way to play the game more efficiently, this is going to be the way the player will keep playing the game. This is often used in games to push the player toward a specific playstyle, in Great Flight, we use it to let the player understand the game correctly and clean the data correctly, as the best way to get high scores in the game overlap with the most efficient way to clean data.

From the tests done with the game, what came out was:
-A perfect understanding of the game mechanics from all the player.
-The players got around 3% better in playing the game.
-Higher quality of the final data, as greedy/malevolent and inexperienced players have no access to the dirt data.

I hope you enjoyed reading about this experiment. Feel free to contact me for any question!