If you read The Saturday Papers regularly, you’ll know that there’s a lot of wonderful research going on related to games all around the world. You need a lot of things to do research – great students, great research leaders, grant money, time, luck, and more. But maybe most importantly, in our field at least, sometimes the one thing you need most is players. Today you can play a game and help out a bunch of great scientists with their experiments. Here’s how. 
Cabbage Quest is a game about real-world knowledge and judging other players. You and a partner are given a location – a type of shop – and then have to classify objects based on where you might find them. Depending on whether you compete with your partner or help them you’ll earn different amounts of points (depending on how fast you are). It’s a cute bit of game theory, and more importantly you’re helping out the folks at Georgia Tech with their latest study.
Here’s some words from Kristin Siu, who’s running the study:
We’re running a study of a game with a purpose to collect commonsense knowledge. Different versions of the game give you points for playing collaboratively or competitively. The study takes about 10 minutes to play.
We’ll give you a quick tutorial, followed by as many rounds of play as you wish. Once you’re done playing, click “Finishâ€, and complete a quick post-game survey.
Note: to complete the study, participants must play at least five rounds of the game and submit the post-game survey. However, you should feel free to play for as long as you want after that.
The only requirement to play is a browser with the Unity web player plugin installed. If you don’t have the plugin, the website will provide you a link to download it or you can access it from here directly:
If you have any questions, contact Kristin Siu at kasiu@gatech.edu
If you’d like to see more from the Georgia Tech folks, check out this Saturday Paper about a flexible world generator.
Hi! I wanted to give this a try but it’s not working..
Unity web player loads and then the screen turns grey/blueish and nothing happens.
(tried both latests versions of chrome and firefox)
It might be because the survey period has ended, but I’ll pass on your comments to the survey organisers anyway!