Helping via Gaming – January 2010 Ideas
The seventeenth idea for my 365 social ideas is an idea for using the genereal need for casual gaming to solve important tasks: Helping via Gaming. It could be as simple as building dictionaries (for instance via the open dictionary projects initiated by OpenOffice or via Wiktionary), or assisting book scannings (make reCaptcha into a game) or some larger tasks assisting human mankind.
Maybe others can identify tasks like protein folding (like in the folding@home project) but that require the recognizability features of the human brain, that cannot be solved via computing power alone.
Folding@home (or SETI for that matter, though IMO not really worth it), does have a certain appeal to a lot of people, but you don’t really know what it is doing og have any direct interaction with it – it simply sits on your computer and does something. And it mostly appeals to people, who already have a scientific mind and know what the purpose is.
Imagine bringing some project like dictionary creation/verification/qualification/expansion to Facebook for a really cool fun addicting word game, that could spread virally in no time. How fast could you verify words, types, forms, spellings, translations etc. with the help of hundreds of millions of casual game craving users?
Why?
Because casual gaming is here to stay, so let’s make the most of it by actually harnesting the combined brain power of a large user base for a common good while providing fun procrastination.
What’s next?
Do with this idea whatever you like – expand, implement, trash or forget. Just remember, that if you use it in anyway make sure to attribute me according to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, that all these 365 Social Ideas are published under.
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