Thoughts and Notes on the Commonsense Collection Games (I)

The "Test Your Unspoken Consensus" Game

The interface of our facebook application has been evolved several generation. I find this evolution fairly promising that, the barriers against one's access to the history of others or his/her own activities have been broken down - one after another, which in turn fostered the bonds between different users and made them stronger and stronger. Now, as a user, you're not only allowed to browse historical records such as the number of questions you've asked, the matched answers that you share with any other particular user, or the answers to each of your questions that other participants provided. What's even better - despite the fact that you may not have noticed this implicit improvement - you get to fill the blanks and complete all the half-pairs (i.e. questions or answers) via interfaces that require almost the least amount of interface steps, for example, as simple as making a "Yes-No" selection.

The whole usage experience becomes, as all the channels for social interactions become wide open, a fluent flow of flying amongst the clouds of users and their activity histories.

Looking at the now-enjoyable interface and fairly active social engagement, I started to think about this question: Why are people coming to this application and why are they staying here? They may want to meet other people, to join a new community, to have fun, or to feel surprised by the unexpected answers, social links, new faces, find their past activities.... whichever answer it may be, to me it seems always true that they are looking forward to building some kind of connection or handshake with other people, by the magical answer-answer match.

To clarify how the "right" interaction mechanism that equips or even encourages this handshaking activity should be and why, maybe it is time for us to think about the below elements/issues:

• Input strategy
  Of what sorts should the input methods be? Why do we choose these types? What about other possibilities?
  
• Historical record display
  Why are we showing them the records? What should we show and what shouldn't we show?
• Instant/asynchronous feedback
  "For this question, there are three other users that share the same answer with you"; "You have two matches with this user. Keep going!".....There are endless information to be responded to the users as they type things into the application. Do we respond to them instantly? Or do we respond to them asynchronously? What is the difference? Is it important in any way?
  
• Anything else...?
  

It is important to think about these questions not only because we want to make whole environment enjoyable, but, more importantly, we need to collect data while they are immersed in the activity. From the experience we've gained up to now, it is not difficult to find that social website has a great potential for human computation, because there's a need for it. That is, people need it - at least to certain degree. Many users log on because they need to find topics to talk about or gain opportunities to get engaged with each other, or even more sadly, to get rid of the desperation of loneliness. It is different from traditional human computation mechanism that, somehow it solves the users' own problems while they provide information that is, ironically, useful. In other words, if we build a better environment that they like better, we get more or even better information that we want. As they meet other people and build communities and even foster their own "culture" particular to each of these communities, the games or applications in turn bring them back certain degree of "belongingness". That's said, the whole mechanism becomes mutually beneficial between the participants and the application developers, the virtuous circle appears as the application developers provide more fun and enjoyable environment for social engagement, and the participants come and stay and get more and more engaged.