Gamification as a paradigm for the evaluation of visual analytics systems

The widespread web-based connectivity of people all over the world has yielded new opportunities to recruit humans for visual analytics evaluation and for an abundance of other tasks. Known as crowdsourcing, humans typically receive monetary incentives to participate. However, while these payments are small per evaluation, the cost can add up for realistically-sized studies. Furthermore, since the reward is money, the quality of the evaluation can suffer. Our approach uses radically different incentives, namely entertainment, pleasure, and the feeling of success. We propose a theory, methodology and framework that can allow any visual analytics researcher to turn his/her evaluation task into an entertaining online game. First experiences with a prototype have shown that such an approach allows tenthousands of evaluations to be done in a matter of days at no cost which is completely unthinkable with conventional methods.