Ewrick's Rabbit Hole

Lots of our daily tasks are tedious to do, probably a large per­centage of them, by anyone’s account… But what if it were just a matter of per­spective after all.

Imagine that you have to sort out old files, and tag entries, or copy stuff. Can you imagine any­thing more boring? It some­times requires the patience of a monk to do these repet­itive tasks, like in the old days of the copyists, before the invention of the movable type printing…

So what worse can it be when it’s the kind of thing which requires a human to do the job. A robot could be pro­grammed, but chances are high that it would always request a human input to adapt its program for new unex­pected data coming into its sorting task. People would be amazed at how much of such tedious repet­itive tasks are being done everyday, even (espe­cially) in the most “high-profile” jobs.

That’s were being a little playful comes in handy. Every child knows that playing is the antithesis of boredom. Making some­thing boring into a game, sounds a bit too easy?

Let’s have a look at the new “game” [Image Labeler] offered by Google.

The prin­ciple is simple and genius: you log in with a nickname, you are paired with someone on the net ran­domly, and you both start to label pic­tures during a limited time period. When it matches on a word, the system issues you points (the more spe­cific the word, the more points you get).

And there, we have Google benefit from this, because it makes their own image searching feature more effi­cient —even more than when it’s merely relying on the words hints on the web­sites of the owners which can be com­pletely mis­leading, like “this is not a dog” in front of a cat’s picture, and you might have the cat picture pop out of a ‘dog’ request).

But the “player” ben­efits too, in many dif­ferent ways. Like any game, you have untold rules you start to dis­cover, and you get better at the game with every play, and that’s the incentive. For instance, for a non-English speaker player, or a with paired UK/US English speakers you will see that you look for the easiest, common denom­i­nator. Most of the time, it’s dom­inant colours of the picture (unless they are already in the words that you cannot use), it can be any word written in the picture etc.

In any case, if there is one thing that it would remind me of, it is:

If that’s boring, make it into a game!

written by Yuki \\ tags: google, image, playfulness