Ryan Buterbaugh, a CS undergrad here at NU working on a combined BS/MS, has brought to life a couple of half-baked ideas I've had about leveraging some of the usable exhaust emanating from Flickr.
matchr is a Flickr puzzle game. The short story is we take a set of eight Flickr tags, randomly select photos labeled with those tags (two per tag), construct a 4 by 4 grid of thumbnails, and ask users to figure out which photos have the same tag. The puzzles are surprisingly difficult, especially depending on which tags are selected. Really generic tags have an amazingly broad range of attached visual imagery.
What's the point from a research angle? Well, matchr allows users to form their own groups, pick their own tag sets, and essentially create new media artifacts from Flickr photos. Puzzles are scored based upon number of match guesses and time to completion. We're interested in understanding how such game construction and playing would fit into a system like Flickr, as an additional means to motivate and encourage participation. There are a few in-system Flickr games and social activities, like deleteme, Squared Circle, and "Day in the Life", but Flickr wasn't really designed to support social activities where folks can build new constructs. matchr is a small prototype to see what happens when such activities are more explicitly supported.
matchr is a bit more involved than other games like fastr, but we hope it's also a bit more engaging over the long term. That said we know there's more work to do, and are open to constructive criticism. If you're a long term NMH reader and want to do us favor, a link would be great.