Landspotting - Games for improving global land cover

Current satellite-derived land cover products, which are very important for answering many crucial questions, show huge disagreements. In this paper, we introduce four serious game prototypes – a Facebook strategy game played on Google Maps, a Facebook tagging game, a tower-defense game, and an aesthetic tile game for the iPad – with the purpose of improving global land cover data. We describe the games in detail and discuss the design decisions we made and challenges we faced while developing the games. We evaluate how much the players have already been able to improve global land cover data and provide evidence that games can be a useful way to increase the quality of this data. Finally, we discuss how the main game is being perceived by the players and what has to be further improved to attract a bigger audience.