Add "Gaming" experiences to family history
Many people are passionate about gaming, and gaming can simulate in a stimulating way (to maintain interest in the process) actual "real world" processes and connections and work in creative ways which connect the work needed in connecting families and records in family search to a "game" scenario. The gaming aspect could convert making correct connections of persons to each other in a data driven way (ie using sources), and will encourage good practices by monitoring the correctness of the results, rewarding "points" for example as good progress is made.
Software engineers who are working in the gaming world would be very creating in making the right types of linkage between a fun experience on the front end, to the doing of "good family history efforts" in family tree on the back end.
This may sound like a difficult effort, but I believe there is a large untapped source of human logic and passion that could be exploited in this effort. The degree to which the gamer actually realizes what is happening on the back end could be leveraged in a way to provide the broadest access to different levels of interest in the actual work of family history.
Let me know if you want more info on what I am suggesting here, in case it isn't clear enough.
Comments
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How would the system determine what is good/correct versus what is an incorrect change?
For example: recently-published indexes of Hungarian civil registrations add the husband's surname to the wife. This makes virtually 100% of those index entries false or erroneous. How would the game assign points in such a situation? If the user first edited the index to remove the false information, would that add points, for making it match, or subtract them, for "possible cheating"? If the first, what about if the image isn't available, so the index isn't fixable? Would the user be penalized for using a faulty index?
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1) Many engineers have thought of adding gamification into Family History. As Julia mentioned we have to know what is correct to be able to score a tree construct. If we knew what was correct we would just create it. The world of genealogy is complex, so complex that sources that don't match all the information are the real sources.
2) The second thought is to reward people for contributing. What if they start contributing junk? Again how do we know if it is junk? What is correct?
There is a project in www.familysearch.org/labs called "Profile Quality Score" that is trying to answer the "What is correct?" problem.
I did notice in the Together app (also found on www.familysearch.org/labs) that there is some kind of coin given for telling stories about yourself and updating your own profile. I'm not sure what you can buy with this but it's there.
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While I may hesitate (and actually cringe) at the idea of turning FamilySearch into a sim-game experience, I fear that Bruce may have a point -- that the younger generations (especially GenZ and Gen-Alpha types) have a compulsion to complete (with the virtual environment vastly exceeding the physical environment), and seem to only get a sense of reward when there is a scorecard involved, or when placed into a competitive electronic environment, where they can rate their achievements against other "players." So yes, a gaming motif within FS might draw in an eager younger audience, but would that actually promote "good family history" or would it create a high-maintenance madhouse needing constant intervention, clean-up and correction. I fear the latter.
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I think this could be scary because some people are already careless and grab any document they find. This could make them worse.
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Sorry I haven't commented on this recently. Obviously we don't want any kind of data contribution which is suspect. The idea is to find aspects of linking data together using human intuition or logic which can also be validated for correctness or accuracy in some way (eg: by having other eyes on it, or using statistical analysis or some other type of computer "follow up" logic.) As AI is added more and more to the processing of Family History data, there will always be places for human feedback and input, and these types of feedback will, in my opinion, lend themselves more and more to being useful in a gaming experience.
Again, this is probably a longer term suggestion for the engineering teams to keep in mind as they explore new ways to move the Family History efforts forward.
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