Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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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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
To be fair, it was basically the premise of "The Last Starfighter" first.
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 inventor, Centauri who invites him to take a ride. Alex does so, discovering the car is actually a spaceship. It turns out Centauri is a disguised alien who takes him to the faraway planet Rylos.
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.
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.