Videotag.co.uk - Game to Experiment with Tagging

Do you like games enough to play for a research experiment? Videotag is a game involving YouTube videos that aims to find better ways of categorizing videos for the visually impaired. They also just want to know why users tag, what users tag, and what type of tags users enter (which of course also greatly serves marketers).

It is a single player game where you tag YouTube videos for points. They show you clips and you simply enter in as many descriptive tag words as you think of. The more original the tag, the more points you get. If you can't think of any, they offer suggestions, but then you get less points. As you gain more points, you can power up to higher levels. The show comedy clips to help make this game more interesting for the user, as it really is just a marketing game.

"Objective *Can the tags entered be useful in creating descriptive text descriptions of internet video, in order to improve accessibility of video for visually impaired users? *Pitfalls = basic level tags. By avoiding pitfalls it is hoped that more descriptive tags will be entered. *Assess the quality of the tags based on their semantic level. Basic level being of lower quality than, subordinate level, descriptive tags. *Example: A video of 2 cats chasing each other up a tree. Basic tags might be Cat, Tree, Chase. More descriptive tags could include the breed of cat, whether it is in a garden, street or park, colour of the cats, the season, an indication of the weather, snow, sunny. Any other distinguishing objects in the video."

Even though this is part of a research experiment that will help visually impaired users as well as commercial marketers, it is a game and people love to play games online. If it serves its noble purpose of helping tag videos for the visually impaired, that is a great thing. If it just ends up serving the ravenous marketing world, well, so be it.

Why do they make people register before playing? This will limit the number of players they get, in my opinion. I suggest they let people play and then ask a few key demographic questions at the end, without having to permanently record their personal information. Also, the home page definitely needs more pizazz and ways to lure people to play. Finally, how are they going to find players?

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