This paper reports our findings regarding the potential of narrative
task framing as a motivator in citizen-science projects dealing with
image segmentation and annotation tasks.
Research showed there to be an informational gap in direct compar-
isons between point-based gamification and a narrative approach
in the context of citizen science. Therefore, we developed two ver-
sions of a singular mobile application to investigate user motivation
while completing the task of annotating images of litter. One ver-
sion with only point-based gamification elements and one with the
task diegetically integrated into a storyline.
The application was developed using Unity, with Android as the tar-
get platform. The JunkCorp Version of the application allows users
to submit annotations while following a story and freely continue
contributing once the story has been completed. Features like a
leaderboard, progress bars, and group tasks, based on research into
gamification and user motivation as well as early user feedback,
were implemented into both versions of the application.
The application was evaluated using the User Motivation Inventory,
the Gameful Experience Questionnaire (GAMEFULQUEST), and
qualitative feedback from interviews with our users.
Our results showed an increase in intrinsic, identified and inte-
grated regulation for the users of the JunkCorp Version. However,
our analysis showed no statically significant relation between user
motivation and the version of the application.
These results suggest that narrative task framing could help retain
motivation in scientific tasks. More research on the area, testing
with more participants, and different implementations of narra-
tive task framing are needed to determine its true potential as an
intrinsic motivator.