An Exploratory Study of Data Quality and Participation in a Games-for-Science Game Community

In this paper we explore what predicts data quality and participation by human subjects in an online, games-for-science community. The advent of games for science, citizen science, and online laboratories represent a new world of possibilities for conducting scientific research with human subjects. However, many questions remain about the quality of participation across individual games. In this paper, we use data on user behavior from a unique dataset of 40,000 game sessions across 14 studies to explore what factors predict game completion, consent, and data quality among volunteer participants on a single platform called Volunteer Science.