Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Why Gaming Is Awesome

So this post is not specific to LARPers, but is totally worth talking about anyways.

A while back, I talked about a few youtube videos that I got from TED (via Ruthless Diastema) about how we can break the stigma if we use games the right way. Turns out, one company did just that.

Foldit is a company that takes real world algorithmic puzzles and turns them into a competitive online gaming environment. I know it sounds like it wouldn't ever be worth anything, but preliminary reports show that they have helped make major steps in the war on HIV.

If you have a lot of empirical work to do, make it seem fun and get people who spend hours on gaming do the work for you. Games build pattern recognition in gamers, which is something that's still somewhat hard to do with computer programming.

As a note, this is exactly what Jane McGonigal talked about at TED.

PS: Here is the full document in regards to steps made in protein structure predictions.

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