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How Gamers Could Save the (Real) World
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."
Lipstick on a pig, etc.
Blizzard:
"A severe snowstorm with high winds and low visibility."
It is hard to "tag" in those conditions...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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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."
Like Ender's Game !!
I'm pretty sure this was part of the premise for SGU...
"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. Rush designs a video game used across Earth to find brilliant minds to interpret the puzzle, which Eli Wallace, a young mathematics genius, is able to solve."
Tags: slow; news; day
This is like attaching generators to people's legs to get them to generate some power. Yeah, the clutch is only engaged occassionally, but it's tedious and will wear on people pretty quickly.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Is this being published by Marvel or DC?
Also: which heroes will be included?
Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada.
... It's not going to be that interesting to make it into an interesting game. Which means a game people will actually play.
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 minigame takes you from staring at the Night Elf dancing on top of a mailbox in Goldshire into staring at blurry pictures of an intersection in Iowa?
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 .
The world is doomed anyway. Even if you win at the game of make Snowden escape the NSA, almost nothing changed, things kept going downhill. The dark side of the force won.
Zynga has nothing to do with it
So now I can tell my wife that I'm trying to save the world with the "hot coffee mod"
Sounds like someone's been reading Neal Stephenson.
F5 doesn't work. Guess we're out of luck. At least we tried, right?
Galaxy zoo is an example of crowdsourcing, it's been made interesting enough that people will do it instead of playing games.
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.
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?
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.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
Sh*t just got real.
Gamers stay out of the streets, which conserves precious gasoline that is in short supply.
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.
God spoke to me
Better somehow to generalize game theory from all those hours gaming and work out from that realistic, sustainable hybrids of competitive and non-competitive economic and social systems so we can get on with getting on.
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, 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.
I was sure this was going to be about how we could cull massive consumption of resources by playing games instead of doing other things. Instead it's about how a modestly sophisticated AI could solve all problems, but for now we can use gamers instead. Just imagine how our problems are all already solved by computers (hint: we will find new problems, at the very least by making more people until said problems prevent that from working)
Sure, lots of non-gamers and non game devs support making making game design not about making the games fun. Really though, I'd play normal WoW over WoW with extra mini-game crap. Game dev is a competitive market, its not some mass of free labor.
OMGprobs Do Something FarmacyVille
...has really jumped the shark.
I can't remember the last time I heard a TED Talk that was truly innovative, inspiring or otherwise worth sharing.
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.
Uh yeah great idea.
How about simply fixing the problems dierectly instead of some leftard solution with layers of bureacracy and attemptring to coerce people into something they dont really care about (and people who dont want the fake help anyway)
Games with flashing lights to send some percentage into seizures (to lower their total carbon consumption) is a much more workable solution.
Why not mobilize all couch potatoes? Install 3 buttons on all TV remotes. Viewers must press "no damage", "mild damage" or "severe damage" before every channel flipping, or better yet, to keep the TV on. Or when I'm driving to work in stop and go traffic, I could do something meaningful with 3 simple buttons in the car...
The R & D institute I work for is getting into CDM ( Crisis and Disaster Management ). One of the first conclusions we drew, when thinking about crowdtasking, was that without harnessing people's "drive to play", it is not gonna work. So these people draw the same conclusion, independently, which corroborates ours.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Ah! I know this womans name. I saw that TED talk mentioned in this article at least two years ago. It was really powerful. However, the games she has worked on are not at the level of a pro gamer. They are somewhat childish in their approach for the tasks to be completed. She is only attempting to make use of 'gamers' collective gaming hours. However, As a player, there is little feeling of accomplishment or reward. There is no competition between players that would drive them to become a better player at her games. They wouldn't dedicate the hours she imagines towards her projects. But this is exactly why she is approaching that company Blizzard.
Some years ago, Blizzard created the MMO game World of Warcraft. It's still arguably the best MMO to date. The reason for their success is because Blizzard studied the successful elements of every online game before it, and they put those elements together into their game. The game has changed it's model several times over the years to adapt to the players and new addicting game-elements. It's exactly those elements that Jane McGonigal's games do not have, which makes perfect sense why she is approaching them.
But I don't imagine that company has as valuable a resource as Jane believes. Given the failure of Diablo 3, Blizzard's interest is in making money at the gamers expense. I don't think that company has what it takes to accomplish anything truly groundbreaking.
I'm looking forward to see what Jane will work on next. I can only hope it reaches a point where I could contribute or participate in an enjoyable game. What she needs is similar to what I've been creating for a independent Black Jack game. I didn't just make a playable game where you could bet and play cards. I added story, a goal, and other familiar gaming elements that would make the player interested and want to progress to the end. Even if they don't necessarily enjoy Black Jack or Card Games, it's those other addicting and fun elements that turns a simple task into an enjoyable game experience.
There are thousands of indie developers out there who are good at recycling the successful elements of games that have come before them, and others who are great at creating new concepts. There are thousands of developers who make games every year at conventions and during competitions just to try something new. If Jane McGonigal really wants to make use of the untapped resource that gamers provide. Then take advantage of the independent game developers themselves. Make this a theme for the next Global Game Jam. In a single weekend, there's bound to be a few games that are worth developing further. Games that could help with real-world issues. Games that gamers would be willing to play. It would be far more then Blizzard could ever do.
Let me get this straight. They're going to put pictures in MMOG games that you can "process" for experience points?
First problem I noticed is that you assume gamers to be 100% honest/accurate in their "processing", and not just grinding through the interface to get their XP points. And if it's possible to verify the gamer entered in the correct information then you already know the result of the processing, why have gamers re-do the work at all?
I can agree that MMO games are often more work than fun, but really? Next you're going to tell me that businesses can increase work done per employee by making an spreadsheet / accounting software into a MMO, "tricking" them into thinking they're not really working!
To think that Slashdotters really think this could work... my opinion of this sites viewer base has been lowered.
It's been here for billions of years and will be here for billions of years. After that time, it will be destroyed by its own sun. This is not preventable and there is no mitigation. So who cares?
I don't know - I listened to Jane's TED talk and in spite of totally liking the idea, I just don't think her argument is very sound. Take her calculation of 21 billions hours a week - she came upon that number by simply extrapolating it from some historical account, where people in a society (I think it was some ancient Greek region) were asked to play games in order to keep their minds of the fact that they don't have food. Multiply the amount of hours spent by ancient starving Greek with today's population size - bam! 21 billion hours per week!
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.
Posting from work, so no login...
While it's not quite a game, volunteers from Openstreetmap have been helping in various disaster scenarios in the past and present by taking images aerial photography and turning them into usable (and potentially editable) maps for the people on the ground.
Take a look at the OSM HOT project (especially the effort in Haiti after the earthquake).
Watch Movie online free >> www.onlinemovienobita.blogspot.com
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I see someone else has read Ender's Game...
~Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
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.
Indeed, it seems more realistic to harvest the computing power of people immersed in a virtual reality rather than their bodily energy (the latter does not make a lot of sense: biomass would be so much more effective).
Given that we have already had a few gaming related deaths, life support systems would make some sense. And once you have them, performance-enhancing drugs are certainly going to quite increase efficiency.
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.
Making people sort through war zone victims might decrease their enthusiasm for supporting wars. It's nothing like what the actual victims have to go through, of course, but stopping the emotional detachment might be a really good idea.
Exactly because there are things that nobody wants to see.
The efficient way to tackle a problem is to tackle it directly. If you want to save the world get people to stop gaming and actually work to a solution. Creating an escape for people from the real world and then claiming we'll recover some of the lost work in the game so it's a net positive is just silly. It's almost like justifying that i's perfectly ok for kids to skip school on the first day the new COD is released because they have to read the instruction booklet.
to harness gamers' time
I get really nervous when anyone suggests that other people's time is something to "harness". If they call for volunteers, great. If they try to siphon off any of my time and attention without my consent, then my response is "fuck off, slavers."
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If they were truly serious, they would talk about harnessing the power of porn. Horny people will go to great lengths to get their fix, and they have no problem doing microchallenges on the internet. Any task you can convince an internet gamer to do for Mankind is also a task you can convince an internet fapper to do for Mankind (and Womankind).
Damn fuzzy eyes first thing in the morning... I read the headline as "How Gamera Could Save the (Real) World"
I don't know if anyone has mentioned it yet, but Ingress by niantic labs@google is a great example. It's a gps based Mmoarg (massively multiplayer online augmented reality game), played with your Android device, that plays like a combo of geocaching, capture the flag, and foursquare. The player's movement data is harvested by Google and is being used to bring it's walking navigation up to par with its turn - by - turn navigation. It's an insanely fun and addictive experience, with the added bonus, that me, a 40 year old who has never got regular exercise in his life, is now walking 15-20,000 steps a day.
How are games going to solve the problem that everyone in charge is apparently stupid or psychopathic. Hunger is a solved problem, we just need to allocate our resources correctly.
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 rescuer time in the real world. Either that, or some players would just tell everyone to always vote yes or always vote no, in an attempt to always get the best reward. The level of altruism in a specific gaming community might need to be continually calibrated (using pictures of known good or bad areas), and results thrown out if the community as a whole turns into trolls.
It is a clever idea, putting human intelligence to work on problems that are simple for the human mind but still too complex for computers. Sort of a SETI-at-Home idea, but using the human brain's unused cycles. Implemented in the right way, it could be integrated seamlessly into the gameplay. It will be interesting to see what comes of this. Maybe Ender's Game isn't as far off as we like to think.
Had to say it.
Games? What do games have to do with it? How can these idiots be so muddled in their thinking? If disasters create a need for this sort of labour then build a platform and let people who want to help download a a client and get assigned some chunk to work on. The server aggregates results and assigns the chunks. Spread the word via social media when there's an urgent need. Job done. I don't play computer games at all these days but I'd be happy to tag images for an hour if it would help responders to a disaster. This utterly mistaken idea that this concept needs to be coupled with gaming can only have come from a sort of 'cargo cult' view on computing. Oh, look at all these geeks playing computer games all day, we need to harvest them for our tasks, so lets embed them in the games...
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 clearly wouldn't be...)
Let's focus on something more important! .... like asking Blizzard to give my Priest 600 Enchanting!! It's taking FOREVER to get skill gains :( it's because it takes too long to find the materials to enchant (by disenchanting stuff I find or make using tailoring). Buying the materials from the AH is way too expensive and there's usually not enough anyway.
This is WAY more important!
I looked at this and read Gamera and was wondering how a rocket powered turtle was going to save the real world.
Even avoiding the whole "another excuse to be lazy" argument about "gamers," this is foolish from a purely economical point of view. It has been proven time and again that, no matter how helpful a for-profit organization is to the general public, it is always for-profit and will focus on profit, not on "the greater good." All the huge publishers will probably try to hop on this bandwagon and whip their developer-slaves into a frenzy churning out more and more shit. But none of it will actually help anyone in real life because the publishers are doing it TO MAKE MONEY.
Helping people == losing money
Game sourcing or making projects using game tools has great potential for solving problems or massing research data Imagine making a game environment about a trip to mars or a mars landing or go even further colonizing a new world this all can be simulated and 10s of thousands of players can amass huge amounts of data and answer some important questions even find new questions never contemplated. but no game makers are out to make money not save lives or make the planet a better place to live.
Here it is 2013 and im asking myself why there isn't an online virtual learning environment? the technology has been available for nearly 10 years.
log in to the online virtual learning environment. walk the campuses of the world. Want to learn about the moon? pop on a platform and poof your on the moon! want to learn French? step on a platform and poof your in France schools have been teaching more or less the same way since before the horse and buggy its time for learning to evolve and get off the broken conveyor belt.
... You want the largest group of egotistical flamers and trolls on the planet to submit their, "accurate, truthful opinion" on photos determining the scale of damage? Sounds like you're relying on the wrong demographic. Don't get me wrong, I'm a gamer, but a very nice one at that. A majority of them would love to screw this system up in a MAJOR way.
End transmission.