Gameification

[pip3]

Mangadex is in a unique place in where it was able to centralise many, maybe even most, manga scanlation efforts happening globally.
Personally, it has motivated me, and undoubtedly many others, to start groups of their own because it's role as a hub that removes some of the worries of your work fading into obscurity, as you struggle to advertise your blog to the people that might care about the the thing you're translating disappearing.
The big manga channels on IRC are a thing of the past, too. The last major one left is invite only.
That said, I think there are a couple things more that could be done to incentivise more scanlation projects. They can all be summarized under the unberella term "gameification".
An expamle of a service that's comparable to Mangadex, in that it relies on user contributions for it's content, is Musixmatch. Musixmatch is a music lyrics aggregator, with it's main front-ends being its Android and IOS apps.
To keep up user engagement and most of all, contributions, each user gets rewards for their contributions. Translating, syncing or transcribing lyrics each give a number of experience points, there are badges to be earned for translating e.g. 100 lines, each song and artist have a leaderboard for their top contributors of lyrics and there are global weekly leaderboards.
There are are many other examples of gameification being employed to get people to do stuff for virtually free, simply by giving their ape brains a steady flow of dopamine.
Think private bittorrent trackers, social media, online curses the alt-right etc.
Now, I know that scanlating is considerably harder and more time consuming to pull of than to write down the lyrics of a song. Obviously, ranks, rewards and the like should be adjusted accordingly. Also we should think very hard about what to incentivise. Rewarding scanlators on the basis of views or time they take to release a given chapter, would increase the groups rushing to get the latest chapter of major shonen XYZ out before anyone else can, resulting in even more rushed and subpar chapters, when there are possibilities to make people scanlate older and more obscure titles.
An example of how this could be archived would be an algorithm, that adjusts xp rewards earned by scanlating titles based on the time since the manga's initial release as well as the popularity of the author, genre, tags, length and the target demographic (e.g. seinen).
These factors each add, or take, a small procentural boost on experience points earned by releasing chapters. Characteristics that attract less viewers by average in a given time period like a week would add more experience points to the uploader, needless to say, to increase the amount of non-typical, older, more innovative, titles that aren't shonen manga and generally new titles being translated.
There could also be a ranking of manga based of the rewards they give so people looking for titles to translate could get recommendations and ideas.
Obviously, this would present a bunch of challanges to the devs that I, as a code-illiterate could probably barely begin to understand, but it's my idea of a ideal manga scanlation platform.

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

There are plenty of problems here:

1. Exploitation of game rewards

Spoiler

Even if you get rewarded for quality, what stops a good enough translator from scanlating 4-koma mangas with extremely short chapters? That scanlator will shoot up by releasing a lot of "good" chapters. And even if you take chapter length into consideration, that still leaves the algorithm to decide quality into question. What is it, how to build it, who is gonna maintain it, what updates does it need, how to avoid players from exploiting the system and breaking the algorithm, typical tech stuffs.

2. Probably no one will care

Spoiler

As with all point systems, only the highest of the highest would care about points as they feel as if they are competing for the highest place, since everyone would watch the top rankers. Everyone at the bottom would feel no competition. That's the reason games have "ranks" and if this were a thing I would advice to implement ranks too.

Another reason that no one will care is because a lot of scanlators translate as a hobby or a job. That's enough motivation. Also I can see plenty of people not caring about points since it would pressure them.

3. Devs have better jobs to do then building complex algorithms for something that no one might care about.

 

[pip3]

@DANDAN_THE_DANDAN

very fair point. i don't think that particularly many ppl would care either. for example, i used to have musixmatch and i grinded points like crazy on it for like one entire afternoon until i eventually got tired of it and uninstalled the app.
now that i think about it, this wasn't much of a suggestion but more of a "how could gameification be implemented on mangadex?" thought play that i typed down because i got bored on the train haha.

the effort it would take and the uncertainty over its success make this nothing more than theoretical and i'm aware of that.

But you would agree that the idea on principle is at least interesting, right?

 

[BzzBzz]

I don't mean to be mean but we don't need e-peen competition here. IMO.

 

[pip3]

@BzzBzz
there's that, too. ppl inflating their ego with dumb shit also happens without e.g. an xp system too, tho.

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

@pip3 Not really... Scanlation isn't something that can be gamified. Not sure how I out it in words but I guess a way I can say it is that it's too much effort and too in-the-real-world to gamify?

 

[Goretantath]

I love the idea of "gamifying" things but seeing how the apps on google play are just for to-do lists and how they are implemented makes me think that "gamification" is something of an "opt-in" type of thing, not a "part of the main system" type of thing. And the reward system would have to be human based, not full algorithim based since it would be too easy to cheat the system, but that would prob mean some rating system and my ideas on rating systems were met with fear of "explosive e-peen enlargement wars" so thats out of the question, i just dont see how to make a fair exp system that cant be exploited(especialy since the majority of ACTUAL games hve exploits out the wazzoo). If you find a way to make an impartial and not worth it to try exploiting exp system let me know though, my game could benifit greatly from it. Tc and have a nice day x3

 

[Jumballi]

Oh I’d hate to see sniping with this feature, groups are already salty as is with the current state of scanlation. it’s a casual hobby, not a job and making it a game will reduce the casual side the community has.

 

[SoLei]

@DANDAN_THE_DANDAN
But isn't e-hentai gamified?

 

[Teasday]

I personally don't particularly like gamification-driven user participation but rdn and Holo seem into it. Regardless, even if we implemented some forms of it on the site, I don't think we would apply it to scanlation but general site user social contributions like perhaps adding manga info and covers, ratings and reviews, creating and sharing lists and stuff like that. Things that are particular to the site itself.

 

[htt]

the whole views/favourites/likes counter system is enough gamification for me. it's a bit of a stretch to call that gamification, admittedly.

my main concern as a reader would be a flood of poor quality scans (mistranslations, use of manga temple font poor typesetting, blanket white-box redraws, etc.) for popular series along with snipes and rushed jobs in a mad scramble for points. balancing this seems like a nightmare, especially algorithmically -- the brute approach i can see is presenting the reader with a survey to rate/review the scanlation quality after finishing a chapter, which is a hilarious prospect.

what i'd kind of like is a bounty board type system, for series people want to see. basically a formalised version of the dropped manga wish list thread