Manhattan Story Mashup
website

Game Environment

• Website for anyone worldwide
• 180 Manhattan players with N80 phone w/ camera
• Large times square displays to show results
• Choose a theme for your story in the games website
• Collaborative story creation based on replacement of nouns
• The N80 players have to find a photo to represent the noun that was changed.
• keywords distributed evenly, but very short-lived
  • so you have to find your image fast
• final images and story shown in Times square on huge monitors

Contribution: large, heterogeneous data set of real-world data using mobile phones, to evaluate modeling approaches

Stats:

• 184 participants
• 165 web participants
• 3142 photos
• 115 stories
• 313000 GSM cell ids
• 54567 game events
• 90 minutes

Implementation Lessons

• Linux+ObexTools helped to automate installing onto 200 phones
• batteries are designed for average users, remember to recharge
• stable software: use Python
• easy to reboot on-the-fly, keep data safe
• easy-to-use UI : eye-candy matters
• Stateless client, seamful design (intermittent connect)
• SEAMFUL DESIGN : Google it

Design Lessons

• Simple systems produce richest data
  • People hate popups
  • Researchers/Designers get blinded to complexity
• Immersion
  • People love to concentrate on seductive task
  • Make system fast-paced
• Ambiguity
  • Leave room for interpretation
  • Ambiguity as a resource for design
• Creativity
  • Let people "abuse" the system
  • Acting out words, and taking a picture of that, for example
• Teamplay
  • Teams are more fun; let them happen
• Competition
  • Motivates the players to win
  • Make them feel like there's a chance

Summary

Good quality data does not come for free, unless you motivate a large number of people to generate it for you by giving them something fun to do!