I just had some thoughts on how a point system could be made for gameification of Mapillary. The current point system does not encourage e.g. to cover areas not already covered or cover areas better. I don’t expect it to be used, but perhaps it can help brainstorming to the final result.
I started thinking when I started playing Munzee: People set up stickers with QR codes everywhere. They get points for that and when people can them both gets points. In my local area they are everywhere. If just half of these people spend that effort on Mapillary, there would be much better coverage.
The big picture
The goal of the game is to conquer as much as the World as possible.
The World is split into squares which measures anything between 5x5m to 30x30 meters. Setting the size should take into account the precision of GPS devices and still be so small that only a single road will usually pass through a square.
The person with most “points” in a square has conquered it.
Points are given to encourage to take pictures in new places, to go where less people goes, to point the camera in many directions and to revisit areas after some time.
When to get points
A normal picture is worth 1 point. Within a square a person can only get points for up to e.g. 24 (here 3x8) images and they should point in 8 different directions (I knows the compass of phones are horrible bad). I.e. 3 sets of images each with 8 images pointing in different directions. This will encourage to also point the camera in other directions than just straight ahead.
Panoramas should count for more points, e.g. 10 points (in this example only giving points for 3 in each square), spherical photos should e.g. count for 20 points and historic images (date before Mapillary started) should also get a premium that corresponds to the time it takes to find them and manually geotag them.
Points changes value
To encourage getting newer pictures of an area, e.g. of every season, points should decrees in time. They could e.g. have full value for 3 months, then start to get less valuable with but never reach zero.
Points for quality
Images that are technically good should get more points than e.g. shaken images. This could also be part of the game:
Just as in the traffic game other people assign quality tags. You only get to evaluate pics from another country than yours and perhaps 2 people should agree within a margin to get a confirmed quality.
When you contributes an evaluation, and another user agrees with you, one of your images will be put into the set of images that others will evaluate and you will get more points in that way.
Privacy
Areas marked as private in OSM could be set to count as 0 points, so people will not take the easy path of violating others privacy.
Bells and whistles
No game without graphics and sounds. I have no idea here 