Mining Human Shape Perception with Role Playing Games

Abstract

Games with a purpose’ is a paradigm where
games are designed to computationally capture the essence of the
underlying collective human conscience or commonsense that
plays a major role in decision-making. This human computing
method ensures spontaneous participation of players who, as
a byproduct of playing, provide useful data that is impossible
to generate computationally and extremely difficult to collect
through extensive surveys. In this paper we describe a game
that allows us to collect data on human perception of character
body shapes. The paper describes the experimental setup, related
game design constraints, art creation, and data analysis. In
our interactive role-playing detective game titled Villain Ville,
players are asked to characterize different versions of fullbody
color portraits of three villain characters. They are later
supposed to correctly match their character-trait ratings to
a set of characters represented only with outlines of primitive
vector shapes. By transferring human intelligence tasks into core
game-play mechanics, we have successfully managed to collect
motivated data. Preliminary analysis on game data generated
by 50 secondary school students shows a convergence to some
common perception associations between role, physicality and
personality. We hope to harness this game to discover perception
for a wide variety of body-shapes to build up an intelligent shapetrait-
role model, with application in tutored drawing, procedural
character geometry creation and intelligent retrieval.