Crowdsourcing mobile content through games: An analysis of contribution patterns

Crowdsourcing of mobile content has become a major way of populating information-rich online environments. One approach to motivate participation is via games. That is, a crowdsourcing game is built upon the desire of individuals to be entertained while generating useful outputs as byproducts of gameplay. A gap in current research is that actual usage patterns of crowdsourcing games have not been investigated adequately. We address this gap by comparing content creation patterns in a game for crowdsourcing mobile content against a non-game version. Our analysis of 3024 contributions in both apps reveal 10 categories, divided into: (1) those that conform more to the notion of mobile content utilized to learn about a specific place or for navigational purposes; and (2) those that were about the content creator himself/herself, or in relation to other users or other non-playing individuals, with the location as a backdrop, similar to status updates in social media platforms like Twitter. We argue that both categories are potentially useful in that they meet different needs, and together could serve to recruit and sustain participation in the longer term. Further, the distribution of categories varied across the apps, indicating that the features afforded by games shape behavior differently from non-game-based approaches to crowdsourcing.