Crowdsourcing Games: The Fun Way to Change the World

This post was originally written for a digital culture class. See it here.

Dr. Burton talked to us in class yesterday about crowdsourcing and creativity and how the digital age provides us ways to create things together like never before. Today, I'm going to talk about a few crowdsourcing projects that have been packaged as a game to inspire more effort, creativity, and time out of participants.

Foldit

Folder Madde's top scoring solution to the Mason pfizer monkey virus
(image credit: Fold.it)

We talked about one such game in class, called Foldit. Foldit is a game about protein folding that invites players to find patterns in complex proteins and play around with them and try and fold them into the best possible shape so it has the function biologists want it to have. Proteins can fold into almost an infinite amount of shapes, with each shape causing the protein to function differently. Because of this, predicting what shape the protein needs to be in to function properly (to cure a disease, for example) is very difficult and very expensive, even with advanced supercomputers. The game, then, finds a way to leverage the creative and pattern-recognition powers of the human brain, and makes it fun to solve an extremely complex problem. Foldit has already helped with research on HIV, cancer, and Alzheimer's disease.

Perhaps the most surprising and wonderful result of Foldit is that even Ph.D. biologists aren't necessarily the best players. Players come from all backgrounds and many of the best players are neither biologists nor tech experts. It's true crowdsourcing--a project that becomes more than the sum of its parts.

But Foldit isn't the only crowdsourcing game out there. Several others have been very successful in solving all kinds of world problems, from oil to malaria, government spending and more.