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."
Gamification must die (Score:2, Insightful)
Lipstick on a pig, etc.
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I mean, until attempting to recruit gamers to do the job, was it practically (In Real Life) proven the bottleneck is the lack of people willing to do it anyway? (or is it a "theoretical projection" [xkcd.com] to impress TED?)
The League of Extraordinary Couch Potatoes (Score:5, Insightful)
Why must Gamification die? It's a very potent concept. It's like saying "Placebos" must die. You might have some intellectual qualms about it "working for the wrong reasons" but it works really well. While we live in an age of explicit gamificiation including reality TV, which gamifies human interaction, basically people have always done things that make their work more than just work. We foster freindly competitions between work teams, we offer prizes for company groups that raise the most donations for charity, etc... You could easily say that the satisfaction of the work or the donations to charity, being incentive enough and we dont' actually need to add external conditions different from the the actual objectives. But that's not how humans work. We like taking long term goals and adding in extraneous rules that divide the long term goal into short term quick rewards--even if they are artificial. The couch potatoe's willingness to lie there perfroming pointless game playing is evidence that humans are sometimes powerless against this rapid reward system, so why not turn that to doing good things.
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Additionally, I don't mind looking through photos, but I bet I'd like it more if I got in-game rewards for doing so.
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Perhaps the coolest development in Gamification is Fold-it, the protein folding game. This game recently went from being just about predicting the structure of proteins to designing new unnatural protein structures. What's cool about it is that it's naturally developed a community where large teams band together to cooperatively work on the same protein, sharing their incremental or large advances. Some people are specialists in certain aspects of the structure optimization. teams have even been cited o
Re:Gamification must die (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed but if I understand correctly this is workification of games.
Re:Gamification must die (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a kind of zombie that never dies. Charles Fourier, utopian socialist, proposed in the 1850s that in the future, productive play could replace work. Vladimir Lenin, glorious leader of the revolution, thought [kmjn.org] in the 1920s that internal competitions were a good way of motivating production. Since then a dozen hack management consultants have been reinventing the ideas of work-as-play, productive play, etc every 10 years or so. Someone coined the word "playbour", if "gamification" wasn't obscene enough for you.
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The McGonigal sisters aren't going to let that prevent them from milking either gamers (who are eager to accept anyone promoting them in any way, because theyr'e so desperate to be seen in any light other than the dorito-munching basement dwellers we usually are) or those gullible to goofy self-help mumbojumbo (her sister is a psychologist who writes books about "Yoga for Pain Relief" and "A Compassion-Based Program for Personal Transformation").
That they've both given TED Talks doesn't impress me, in and o
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Don't knock yoga. It can be a very powerful tool for improving health. [youtube.com]
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"That they've both given TED Talks doesn't impress me"
Likewise, since before Onion's parodies were so close to the real thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEzMNp2d6Bk&list=PL4NL9i-Fu15hhYGB-d0hmSWD1fcIvLvn1 [youtube.com]
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I would pilot an ingame mech fighting Starship Troopers-like aliens, that is really a miniature Terminator hunting bugs in a corn field.
Yes.
Though I would just as well pilot the real thing.
Blizzard (Score:5, Funny)
Blizzard:
"A severe snowstorm with high winds and low visibility."
It is hard to "tag" in those conditions...
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I am not convinced. (Score:5, Insightful)
While there are some similarities between games and work, there are also marked differences. Though the concept of "fun" is nebulous, the fact is, you can't fool a gamer into thinking he is having fun while he is actually doing work. And, inserting work into games will harm their bottom line.
The most that will come out of this is a few work-games that a very small community of players engage in mostly out of altruism, rather than recreation.
Re:I am not convinced. (Score:5, Insightful)
you can't fool a gamer into thinking he is having fun while he is actually doing work
Have you ever seen someone play an MMO?
Re:I am not convinced. (Score:5, Interesting)
And not just MMOs or even RPGs. "Grinding" exists in a lot of games.
The trick though is to actually map the data to be analyzed as well as the gamer response to purposeful in-game actions. For example, in REAMDE (by Neal Stephenson) gamers in a MMO monitor in-game security checkpoints (e.g. as part of clan duties or in return for gold) which model actual security checkpoints at airports.
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People pay money to grind in an MMO. People do not pay money to review images and mark their damage level. Foisting such an activity in an MMO will not result in people paying money to do it, but rather it will result in people leaving the MMO.
But you're missing something important. You can get achievements for reviewing images.
Zack Johnson of Asymmetric Publications once commented that many gamers "would rather get eleven points for stabbing themselves in the dick than ten points for [mumble mumble] the prom queen". That eleventh point is the one that McGonigal is talking about.
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People pay money to grind in an MMO. People do not pay money to review images and mark their damage level. Foisting such an activity in an MMO will not result in people paying money to do it, but rather it will result in people leaving the MMO.
But you're missing something important. You can get achievements for reviewing images.
Zack Johnson of Asymmetric Publications once commented that many gamers "would rather get eleven points for stabbing themselves in the dick than ten points for [mumble mumble] the prom queen". That eleventh point is the one that McGonigal is talking about.
I think I will settle for second on the leaderboard. Is the prom queen an ex-gymnast?
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Yeah, because grinding is pure fun.
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This is why "edutainment" software failed. Kids are not as dumb as the developers thought.
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In the real world... (Score:5, Funny)
How are gamer hours going to translate/transform into real world physical effort?
I think the vast majority of those 21 billion hours per week would be much better spent getting up off of arses and actually doing something.
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.
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Ahh the idiocy of assumptions. I've been playing computer games for the last 26 years and I'm not about to stop.
Now, if you could please say how 21 billion gamer hours, in reference to "saving the human race", would be better spent playing games than doing real work in "saving the human race" then I'd love to know how.
I've already seen the article suggestions. But sorting through a few photos, even a few thousand photos would take a tiny proportion of 21 billion crowd sourced gaming hours. What are we going
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Kill virtual humans, of course. Or zombies or aliens if that's your preference.
The real idiocy here is the presumption that vast numbers of gamers would willingly spend ANY of their time doing anything that benefits anyone other than themselves.
Re:In the real world... (Score:5, Insightful)
Kill virtual humans, of course. Or zombies or aliens if that's your preference.
The real idiocy here is the presumption that vast numbers of gamers would willingly spend ANY of their time doing anything that benefits anyone other than themselves.
Says someone posting in the comments section of a website.
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You posted that only because you _like_ thinking you've spread a little light. Selfish bastard.
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And you commented trying to seem insightful by proving he was a selfish bastard.
It's turtles all the way down.
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No, I was agreeing with him.
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I think you would have to (somehow) map the real-world task to important in-game activity.
Off the top of my head, in an open-world game like Fallout you might have certain dialogue options with inhabitants of a structure which indicate that the player considers the structure ruined. The difficult part is in having the system model the photograph of the structure without itself being able to recognize its state.
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Uhm, what? Sitting inside is the worst thing you can do. Sitting inside means basically doing nothing productive (well, nothing real and physical), while consuming resources like lighting and air-conditioning and/or heating. It's ridiculously wasteful to sit inside watching a big-screen TV in a house chilled down to 73F, when you could be outside working up a sweat in the heat and doing something semi-useful like turning over a compost heap. Just... anything remotely useful and physically productive, be
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.
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That isn't going to take 21 billion crowd sourced gamer hours. What are we going to do with the other 99.999999% of those hours to productively "save the human race".
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Who said we'll be using all of those hours? For some reason, you seem to have assumed that 100% of gaming time should unilaterally be converted into disaster relief time. No one said that, nor would it work in practice.
The idea here is that disaster relief would be a very small part of what goes on in gaming (e.g. mini-games that appear in MMOs in response to real-life crises, something to do on loading screens, etc.) , but that as you increase the amount of gaming that happens, you'll naturally increase th
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Thank you for answering my question (in regards to how you think the hours will be used). But you're wrong, I didn't suggest that all those hours would be used for anything - I asked how they could be used productively.
For arguments sake, lets assume 1% of those 21 billion hours is an achievable time donation from people to help others.
Now we have 210 million man hours per week. That's like having 5250000 workers working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
That seems like too much wasted time. Lets go to 0.1% of t
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Don't be a dick.
Answer the question I posed.
Get off your arse and help humanity.
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Hell, you could do it to speed up some wait for your crops to come in, thus doing some good while doing something pointless.
That's a good idea if you integrate the feature without breeding any resentment. I think the most effective approach would be to model whatever the input is in-game, and have the human analysis required mapped to an in-game action. It's really hard to think of system designs for this which don't require the computer to already be able to perform the analysis.
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Well said.
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You're absolutely right!
Last week, I finally got off my arse and left Riverwood for good. And yesterday I was able to slay a dragon!
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I think the vast majority of those 21 billion hours per week would be much better spent getting up off of arses and actually doing something.
Most would probably catch fire if they left their dark basement and got exposed to that "Sun" thing in the sky.
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Hey arsehole right back at you. I'm a gamer. The 21 billion hours is in reference to the specific hours used to produce results in "saving the human race".
I doubt Blizzard will reply (Score:5, Insightful)
Blizzard's main priority with World of Warcraft is getting people to keep paying their subs, and to do this they make the game as engaging as possible. This goes against that by both managing to destroy the sense of immersion by dragging gamers out of their game world, and also by forming a link in the player's mind between Warcraft and real-world scenes of suffering. Not a connection that most players will want in their recreation time.
Where things may work better is where it's possible to both turn the work itself into a game, and also to wrap it in an appealing layer to stop it having too strong a connection in the player's mind with the reality behind it. An example of this would be the recent Facebook game developed to help identify some genetic factors in Ash tree dieback, as detailed in this BBC News story [bbc.co.uk]. Here the presentation is cute, and the focus is on making it a game. The only problem I could see here is that I can't see how it's cheaper/more efficient to develop and serve the entire content for even a simple game compared to just doing the pattern matching in a more traditional manner, but for other tasks I could see it working.
The basic idea is there though, make the work part of the game rather than making it a task which detracts from the game. Something which this story doesn't seem to recognise.
Overheard in Utopia (Score:5, Funny)
"Hey, there's a big disaster happening. Meh."
"Dude, sent the paramedics to Canada. For the lulz."
"The graphics suck. Everything sucks."
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"Hey, there's a big disaster happening. Meh."
"Dude, sent the paramedics to Canada. For the lulz."
"The graphics suck. Everything sucks."
Just a bit too true to be funny.
Look, I can pick up a hooker, which restores my health, and then kill her to get my money back!*
*Thank you Grand Theft Auto
Great plot for a book/movie (Score:1)
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Say what? (Score:2)
"The Stargate program has founded Icarus base on a remote planet whose Stargate is powered by large naquadria deposits throughout the core. The team, led by Dr. Nicholas Rush, postulate that the power from that core could allow them to use a 9-chevron code to "dial" into the Stargate, allowing them access to locations far remote from their galaxy, but lack the means to translate the writing of the Ancients to understand how to dial this properly. Dr.
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Alex Rogan is a teenager living in a trailer park with his mother and little brother, Louis Rogan. While working as the park's handyman and dreaming of going to college, Alex's sole activity is playing Starfighter, an arcade game where the player defends "the Frontier" from "Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada" in a space battle. Eventually he becomes the game's highest-scoring player. A short time later, he is approached by the game's invent
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Up next... (Score:4, Insightful)
To advance to the next level, match the following corporate logo to its motto...
Well, it can't be much worse than it is now with DLC and in-game tutorials. Gone are the days of Doom when the instruction manual was 'New Game' and you dropped into E1M1 and either figured it out in short order, or died repeatedly until you did. Or like some of the old-school Nintendo games. You couldn't beat them, but they were fun anyway. Now everyone's a precious snowflake and games have different options in case you happen to suck at, say, using a mouse. I'm looking at you, Mass Effect 3.
Re:Up next... (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you seriously bitching that games these days are too fun? That they should be punishing and brutal? Maybe you're some unemployed shut-in who can devote 10+ hours a day to mastering a Nintendo-hard game, but that ain't something to brag about.
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Are you seriously bitching that games these days are too fun?
Umm yeah. I hate fun. True story.
That they should be punishing and brutal?
Strawman much? No. I was making fun of integrating 'real world' things into games. I want an escape, not to have more advertising or fixing someone else's real-world problems shoved down my throat. Which is what the article is suggesting we do. Because if we start adding 'public service' things into games that provide zero profit, how long do you think until gaming companies start using the same technology to make profit with it? I think we can measure the latency there in n
Re:Up next... (Score:5, Insightful)
But Dwarf Fortress exists. So do Super Hexagon and I Wanna Be The Guy and a bunch of other difficult games. Mainstream titles too, e.g. XCOM's hardest mode with save-scumming disabled (I forget the name of it). There are plenty of options for people who want something extremely challenging. It's just that there are also options for people who don't have the time to master that shit, and just want to unwind. The only people who think that's a problem are the "elite" gamers who are angry that their hobby has gone mainstream and attracted a broader audience.
Re:Up next... (Score:4, Insightful)
The only people who think that's a problem are the "elite" gamers who are angry that their hobby has gone mainstream and attracted a broader audience.
+5, Strawman.
Let's backup the fail train here and start over: Adding external content to a game ruins the experience. I don't want to be fixing somebody else's realworld problems in my entertainment escapism. There's nothing "elite" about this... Nintendo games were simple. They were hardcoded. They didn't have internet connections. And they were still awesome. This has nothing to do with a "broader" audience... it has to do with advancements in technology. Ever since the internet became a thing for games, we've got shit like the XBone requiring it for single-player games. We're integrating advertising into the menus of all kinds of entertainment devices.
This isn't about me going "oh poor me, I'm an elite gamer and all this mainstream attention is ruining the experience"... it's "oh poor me, my entertainment experience is being ruined by profiteering assholes who are shoving shit nobody wants down my throat..." and the only thing a "broader audience" has to do with it, is that they're too damned apathetic and ignorant to know that it was ever any other way.
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Greetings. (Score:5, Funny)
Good idea on paper but... (Score:1)
Sure, having those millions of eyes clicking away at real pictures would be tremendously helpful but it's not that easy to get them to actually look at said pictures.
Popular games are designed from scratch to be attractive, addictive, progressively rewarding, etc. And existent ones won't risk their popularity by introducing something that doesn't fit in that design. What kind of
If... (Score:2)
If everyone spent their free time playing video games insead of having sex, then there would be less population and a lot of the worlds problems would go away.
Slashdot users are already doing their part .
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I've done my part so much that I've made it all red and sore.
Too late (Score:3)
GTA (Score:1)
How Gamers Could Save the World (Score:2)
Don't need a game, just a web site or similar (Score:2)
Of course you could use people that produce entertainment to make these things interesting, so maybe using WoW staff to bring elements of WoW into something designed to do a task.
Griefers (Score:1)
In the course of every video game ever produced, someone has figured out a way to play it "wrong", often in imaginative ways that the designers never imagined in their wildest dreams. Often in ways that are extremely destructive to the original intent of the game. WOW plague in real life wouldn't be very funny.
How's that going to work?
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I don't think it even takes griefers to make this system back fire. Once the gamers learn that you get the same result no matter the option they'll just select the same answer, or the default one over and over.
what part of "disaster area" didnt you understand? (Score:2)
if you are going to be showing images of disaster areas, there are going to be dead people, possibly killed in gruesome ways. the knowledge that you are looking at something real can turn something that would be funny in a video game to be a nightmare inducing image. there are things that nobody wants to see.
Works so well in time of crisis (Score:3)
Sucks to be him. Or you.
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Witness the crowdsourced identification of the Boston bombing dudes. Some poor dude was 'identified', and a semi-major newspaper picked it up..."Hey...that's the guy!" Sucks to be him. Or you.
Good point. This approach presupposes that all involved are (a) competent to make the assessments and (b) committed to the accuracy of the outcome. If you are in a disaster area, if sucks to be you if the people being shown pictures of the rubble of your house are neither.
Ender's Game (Score:1)
Gamers already save the world sometimes (Score:5, Interesting)
Gamers like stoners, have a tendency to actually enjoy their life, so they're not as likely to go screw around and hurt other people's lives.
But on the flip side:
Gamers are satisfied with their life of gaming and don't care what goes on in the world around them as much. This generation has its bread and circuses and isn't likely to revolt. But why should we get upset with government anyway? It is always screwing people over so it isn't like there is anything new there. Best is to live in your gaming community and have fun while the rest of the world is busy trying to screw each other over.
If gamers really wanted to save the world, this is all they'd have to do:
Play the latest and greatest MMO where you can sell lewt and make real money. Then donate a portion of the money you make playing video games to the poor. I'm sure a lot of them do this now.
The only thing I really worry about is if gaming communities start getting like what happened to League of Legends. You can get cursed out just by joining games and choosing your character. People have such a short fuse there. And people who are jerks to others triggers other people to backlash and become jerks in a way too. LOL is pretty fun and kinda easy compared to Starcraft, but the toxic community means it is unplayable for pubbies.
Coming from the arcade generation where everyone was pretty cool in person. Except from the rare time when someone doesn't pay up on a gambling wager and gets throttled, I never saw anyone rage on someone else. The worst I saw apart from that in 20 odd years in arcades is people calling other people cheesers for doing the same move over and over in fighting games. The best was when I was under 10 and a highschool kid used to give me quarters to play asteroids, or other forging of friendships.
To me, the gaming communities can forge the general population's personalities. And today you had people like Idra and other streamers making it seem cool to rage on other players because they get more views. That stuff isn't cool, it is childish. I wonder how much rubs off on League of Legends players thinking it is okay to rage on strangers as a result. Probably not at all, it is probably just the fact that 5 strangers are being forced to play as a disciplined team. I guess this is the same premise that gets ratings on Survivor, but people have a reason to at least appear to be nice to each other there.
Anyway, these are just some observations. For the most part, I think gamers help society by sponsoring tech. Would we have as cool as computers today if there weren't people churning quarters into pong and pacman back in the day? I'm happy with my fellow man being satisfied with life. Gaming really ups the quality of my life as it gives an outlet for my desire to do problem solving and combat related thinking. I'd say in general that gamers aren't really a problem for society even though Congress always wants to paint them as a scapegoat for problems that have been around as long as man has existed. Are we going to unite like they did back to protest Vietnam, no, we won't... Probably not unless they go and shut off the Internet.
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"The only thing I really worry about is if gaming communities start getting like what happened to League of Legends."
The problem with league of legends isn't the people, it's the developers. Older games like Quake allowed you to run your own servers, because everything is centralized and matchmaking is forced you are forced to be with assholes. It's just game companies desire for absolute control over the game that creates these issues. The F2P and MMO developers won't give their audience the ability to
More Realistic (Score:1)
CAPTCHAs and Foldit (Score:1)
IRL's approach seems to be: have gamers to do something they don't want (tagging photos), in order to get something they want (games). Which seems reeeally close to what ReCAPTCHA is doing (read unscannable words, so you can sign up for accounts). (Although tagging disaster areas will need more training than reading mungled text.)
And then there's FoldIt [fold.it], which challenges players with folding proteins into a minimum energy state. This is key to understanding how proteins work, and important for understanding
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IRL's approach seems to be: have gamers to do something they don't want (tagging photos), in order to get something they want (games). Which seems reeeally close to what ReCAPTCHA is doing (read unscannable words, so you can sign up for accounts). (Although tagging disaster areas will need more training than reading mungled text.)
And then there's FoldIt [fold.it], which challenges players with folding proteins into a minimum energy state. This is key to understanding how proteins work, and important for understanding diseases and creating new medicine. In FoldIt, though, the work (folding proteins) is the game, and training comes as a set of tutorial levels. People can play solo for high score, or try to improve on the solution of others.
Just open up a website with a decent client (like FoldIt did) and I think you'd find tons of people would happily volunteer time to help out with a natural disaster. The problem at the moment is there's no medium to do that - the idea that we somehow need to trick or force people into it is skipping the all important "how much time would people volunteer given the chance?" step. FoldIt is a triumph in that regard, but the main thing is it's pretty straight-forward - they didn't think they needed to trick pe
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TED... (Score:2)
I can't remember the last time I heard a TED Talk that was truly innovative, inspiring or otherwise worth sharing.
Solving Obesity by playing 7x as much? WTF? (Score:2)
Maybe cut that obesity rate down and you can solve some hunger issues at the same time. And cut ethanol while you're at it.
Why pick on gamers? (Score:1)
This is not so stupid (Score:2)
21 billion hours... (Score:2)
Ah TED... (Score:2)
Never fails to remind me of mornings growing up on the farm in Iowa. Golden sunrise peeking over the rolling seas of grass as the last stars of the night bid adieu. The coo of morning doves is a promise of great things to come. And finally... a gentle easterly breeze wafts in the suggestion of sweet perfume that at last gives way to the unmistakable stench of bullshit.
Just smell all that bullshit. Glorious.
Watch This!!!! (Score:1)
This sounds familiar... (Score:1)
Fix it at the source (Score:2)
Whenever dealing with incomplete data in software it is always best to try to fix/add the missing data at the earliest time possible. In this case that time is when the photo is taken or uploaded, so the proper solution is to have the social networking software tag the photo by requiring the original photographer/uploader to add the missing data.
Hogwash (Score:2)
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Meh, they're not serious (Score:2)
Ingress (Score:1)
Trolls (Score:1)
I could see this working in the following way. It's a mini-game that grants some amount of experience or reward for playing, but only if you play it "right." So if they're trying to determine if an area in a photo is in need of assistance, each player will only get the reward if they vote with the majority in a secret ballot type of setup.
Unfortunately my experience in games indicates that there are many socially challenged people who would give the wrong answer just for the lulz of wasting valuable rescue
Decouple this from gaming (Score:2)
Gamify? Yes. Game? No (Score:2)
Seems pretty backassward that people would think it was a good idea to force people who want to play a game to instead do helpful things that were obviously inserted for the purpose of being helpful, rather than the purpose of making the game better.
Why not just let people help directly who want to - and then gamify *that* (only to the extent of adding xp, levels, badges, useless cosmetic rewards, etc, not to the extent of actually trying to convince people that what they're playing *is* a game, because it
Oh, "GAMERS"... (Score:1)