How Gamers Could Save the (Real) World 145
Nerval's Lobster writes "Three years ago, game designer and author Jane McGonigal argued that saving the human race is going to require a major time investment—in playing video games. 'If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week [up from 3 billion today], by the end of the next decade,' she said in a TED talk. Her message was not ignored—and it has indirectly contributed to the formation of something called the Internet Response League (IRL). The small group has a big goal: to harness gamers' time and use it to save lives after disasters, natural or otherwise. The idea is to insert micro-tasks into games, specifically asking gamers to tag photos of disaster areas. With the IRL plugin, each image would be shown to at least three people, who tag the photo as showing no damage, mild damage, or severe damage. The Internet Response League has been in talks with a couple of indie developers, including one that's developing a new MMO. Mosur said they've tried to get in touch with World of Warcraft maker Blizzard, but haven't had any luck yet. Blizzard did not return a request for comment from Slashdot."
Re:In the real world... (Score:5, Informative)
well, had you read the article, you'd have learne of the enormous amount of man-hours relief organizations have to spend going through photos, offloading that work frees them up to better spend time. most of us can't just jump on a plane and go help.
Besides which, for those of us not gamers, a donation the size of restaurant bill for two buys surprising amount of supplies.
So yes, we sedentary creatures sitting on our butts in front of a screen can help people thousands of miles away. Go ahead and laugh at us.
Re:In the real world... (Score:5, Informative)
Got bored halfway through the summary and stopped reading, I see.
Well, basically, the people on the ground in these disaster areas have a limited number of hours available to work, and they're currently spending a lot of time doing work that can be off-loaded to people on the Internet (e.g. identifying areas in need of help by way of pictures). While having more people on the ground would clearly be more useful most of the time, few people are willing to drop their lives for a few weeks or months and fly to a region that likely has no electricity, running water, or something that they would typically consider shelter (not to mention that many people would simply get in the way more than they would help), so the more we can do to enable the people that ARE willing to drop everything to get useful work done while they're over there, the better.
Having been to a third-world region in order to work on building a cistern so that they would have safe drinking water, and also working on digging trenches that would eventually be used to run electric and plumbing lines through mountainous terrain (it wasn't during a disaster, however), I can attest to just how valuable it can be to have someone else helping with the logistics so that the people on the ground are able to get as much work done as possible. The more that you can off-load that work, the better, particularly during an emergency.
Re:Great plot for a book/movie (Score:3, Informative)