Games for sketch data collection

This article describes sketching games made for the purpose of collecting data about how people make and describe hand-made drawings. The approach leverages human computation, whereby players provide information about drawings in exchange for entertainment. The games facilitate the collection of raw sketch input and associates it with human-provided text descriptions. Researchers may browse and download this data for their own purposes such as training sketch recognizers. Two systems with distinct game mechanics are described: Picturephone and Stellasketch. The system architectures are briefly presented, followed by a discussion of our initial results using sketching games as a research platform for sketch recognition and interaction.