An Analysis of the ARTigo Gaming Ecosystem With a Purpose

ARTigo is both, a gaming platform and an artwork search engine: While playing, ARTigo’s users leaves annotations describing artworks; these annotations are automatically processed by a higher-order latent semantic analysis for building, and continuously improving, an artwork search engine. ARTigo’s search engine has been developed for, and with, art historians and covers more that 65,000 artworks of different styles and epochs. ARTigo is in operation since 2008. ARTigo’s gaming platform is an ecosystem consisting of different types of games aiming at collecting rich annotations of different type: Description games aim at collecting mere descriptions, diversification games aim at completing artwork descriptions with more specific characterizations, integration games cluster annotations so as to generate more precise descriptions. This article’s analysis points to both, the effectiveness of ARTigo as a gaming ecosystem and the effectiveness of each of the games at collecting specific annotations.