Understanding the determinants of human computation game acceptance. The effects of aesthetic experience and output quality
| Published date | 08 August 2016 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-06-2015-0203 |
| Pages | 481-496 |
| Date | 08 August 2016 |
| Author | Xiaohui Wang,Dion Hoe-Lian Goh,Ee-Peng Lim,Adrian Wei Liang Vu |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval |
Understanding the determinants
of human computation
game acceptance
The effects of aesthetic experience
and output quality
Xiaohui Wang and Dion Hoe-Lian Goh
WKW School of Communication and Information,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and
Ee-Peng Lim and Adrian Wei Liang Vu
School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore
Abstract
Purpose –Human computation games (HCGs) that blend gaming with utilitarian purposes are a
potentially effective channel for content creation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the driving
factors behind players’adoption of HCGs through a music video tagging game. The effects of
perceived aesthetic experience (PAE) and perceived output quality (POQ) on HCG acceptance are
empirically examined.
Design/methodology/approach –An integrative structural model is developed to explain how
hedonic and utilitarian factors, including PAE and POQ, working with another salient factor –
perceived usefulness (PU) –affect the acceptance of HCGs. The structural equation modeling method is
used to verify the proposed model with data from 124 participants.
Findings –Results show that PAE is the strongest predictor of HCGs adoption. PU has a significant
impact on individuals’attitude toward HCGs. POQ is a salient predictor of PU and PAE, and its indirect
effect on attitude is significance.
Originality/value –From an academic poi nt of view, this study provides a goo d understanding of
the driving factors behind player acceptance of HCGs and adds new knowledge to games
with utilitarian purposes. It is also one of the first to describe the components of game
enjoyment with a taxonomy of aesthetic experiences. From the practical perspective, the
investigation of t he specific factor s behind adoption of H CGs provides speci fic guidelines for
their design and ev aluation.
Keywords Acceptance, Perceived output quality, Human computation games,
Perceived aesthetic experience
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Assigning descriptive labels for multimedia resources such as images and videos is
essential for their effective and timely retrieval (Dulačka and Bieliková, 2012).
Traditional approaches to accomplish this include automatic classification and
manually labeling by experts. However, there are shortcomings in both approaches.
Automatic classification has a limitation in generating heterogeneous and accurate
labels. For instance, in classifying and detecting the mood of music, the subjective
nature of the content makes it difficult to use automated algorithms that rely on
quantified and specified metadata (Kim et al., 2008). For resources with video content,
their automatic classification is even more difficult. At the same time, manual lab eling
by experts can be error prone and cost intensive (Von Ahn, 2006).
Online Information Review
Vol. 40 No. 4, 2016
pp. 481-496
©Emerald Group Publis hing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-06-2015-0203
Received 20 June 2015
Revised 19 January 2016
Accepted 27 January 2016
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
481
Determinants
of HCG
acceptance
In recent years, with video games undergoing rapid worldwide growth (Liu and
Li, 2011), the game experience has been used as a means for improving motivation and
participation in non-game contexts, such as health (Hamari and Koivisto, 2014),
education (Ebner and Holzinger, 2007), and commerce (Cechanowicz et al., 2013), to
name but a few. At the same time, a significant amount of research attention has been
placed on the use of video games to harnesses human intelligence to solve large-scale
problems that are out of reach of the capacity of artificial intelligence (Von Ahn and
Dabbish, 2008). These are called human computation games (HCGs). The central theme
of such games is that users are motivated to perform computational tasks, such as
content creation, in the process of gameplay (Goh et al., 2011).
HCGs have been employed in areas such as multimedia tagging (e.g. Kisskissban,
Ho et al., 2009), location annotation (e.g. Eyespy, Bell et al., 2009), and ontology
construction (e.g. Onto Tube, Siorpaes and Simperl, 2010). One such example is Herd-it
(Barrington et al., 2009), which uses game elements to collect tags for music clips.
Players of Herd-it listen to a music clip and are then asked to answer multiple-choice
questions related to the music content. Points are earned based on the percentage of
agreement between a player’s choices with previous answers. These points are
translated into players’ranking in the leaderboard. These gaming elements add a sense
of achievement and hence motivation for players (Yee, 2006). Simultaneously, the short
text-based user-generated answers describing aspects of the music clip can be collected
and used to index it for future retrieval. Put differently, players have fun with the game
while contributing music tags.
Player acceptance is the primary measure of the success of any information system
(Dillon and Morris, 1996). Researchers have suggested that the quality of the outputs
and an enjoyable game experience are possible predictors of intention to play HCGs
(Goh et al., 2012b). In particular, enjoyment is a vital predictor of player acceptance in
gaming contexts (Lee, 2009). Previous research has investigated general perception s of
game enjoyment (e.g. Hsu and Lu, 2004; Shin and Shin, 2011), but empirical research
delving into the components of game enjoyment and their impact on player acceptance
has been lacking. Here, Hunicke et al. (2004) proposed the aesthetic experience, defined
as the emotional responses evoked in players during gameplay, to explain game
enjoyment. They specified a taxonomy of aesthetic elements, providing a concrete way
of examining game enjoyment, thus facilitating the evaluation of game enjoyment
(Aleven et al., 2010). Yet the taxonomy of aesthetic experience has been overlooked in
game acceptance research and has not been applied in HCGs, thus representing a
research gap.
Moreover, output quality is also an important predictor of player acceptance, and
has the potential to influence intention to play HCGs (Delone and Mclean, 2004; Goh
and Lee, 2011). However, its effects have been found as marginal in previous studies
(e.g. Goh et al., 2012b; Pe-Than et al., 2013). To address this issue, perceived usefulness
(PU), referring to “the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system
would enhance his or her job performance”(Davis, 1989, p. 320), has been suggested as
a mediator between output quality and intention to use information systems (e.g. Saeed
and Abdinnour-Helm, 2008). We propose that, instead of directly affecting players’
attitude and intention to play HCGs, perceived output quality (POQ) determines player
acceptance indirectly through PU and perceived aesthetic experience (PAE).
In sum, the present study investigates the antecedents of player acceptance of
HCGs. In particular, we adopt the aesthetic game experience and output quality to
explain users’acceptance of HCGs. The effects of players’perception of aesthetic
482
OIR
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