The popularity of computer gaming is rising fast, but
it's still commonly stereotyped as a hobby that produces little of
value and and encourages an ugly competitive streak.
But to attendees of the
Human
Computation Workshop in Paris, France, last month those are
positive, not negative, aspects of the technology; offering a way
to solve some important technological problems.
Human touch
Dreamed up by Luis von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2004, human computation involves
getting gamers to do work that as yet defies computers.
Von Ahn's first use of the concept was in a game that involves
labelling images – providing a competitive forum for humans, and
tutoring software in computer vision at the same time. A version of
that game, called ESP, is now used by Google to improve
image search results. This game that had
players help biologists find new proteins is another
example.
In Paris, researchers from Yahoo presented a similar "game with
a purpose" designed to improve web search results. Players of
Thumbs-Up (pdf format) are randomly matched with
another player and each shown one search term and two web
pages.
The two players have to agree, without communicating, which of
the two pages is most relevant in order to gain points. Meanwhile
their subjective responses help to improve the search engine in a
way that a computer alone never could.
Seen to be good
These games make clever use of human psychology to achieve their
end. It is players' desire to achieve higher scores that keeps them
motivated through what some might consider a tedious task.
If you're not into casual gaming, though, you may have no desire
to get involved. But there are other ways technology can be used to
harness the natural competitiveness of humans.
For example, an
iPhone application launched in support of Barack
Obama in the run up to the presidential elections made a high score
out of the number of calls a volunteer had made to build support
during the campaign and let them compare it with a national
average.
Similarly, the Tweet-a-Watt power meter that publishes your
domestic energy use over the internet encourages people to
compete to use the least power.
Playing solo
So much is competition built into human nature that we will even
happily play games against ourselves. Indeed, research into driving
habits suggests many people treat
fuel efficiency in the same way as a computer game.
Car manufacturers are now trying to exploit that tendency with
dashboard displays to nurture our competitive
streak.
It's a design tactic worth using more often. After all,
competitiveness may be one of the most renewable resources we
have.
This article originally appeared on
New Scientist.