A recent article in Salon details a designer of multi-user online ARG (Alternate Reality Games). As it says, "her overarching goal is to reduce human suffering in the world," and she plans to win a Nobel prize for her contributions. Said contributions include a game called "World Without Oil," sort of a trial run for severe energy crisis described as "a new kind of alternate reality game, one that came equipped with a social conscience."
Now it may seem to you that such a game is as much a disciplining and information-gathering tool as it is some kind of social intervention. You might note as well that its author is employed by the rather conservative Institute for the Future, founded by RAND researchers — and that one of her notable projects was an elaborate promotional scheme for a new video game from Microsoft. Wow, social conscience is fun and well-paying these days.
But such suspicions pale in comparison to the meat of the article:
Already, strategies that McGonigal first spied in the games are appearing in the real world. Talking Points Memo presented a nice demonstration a few months ago, when the Department of Justice released more than 3,000 pages of documents relating to the fired U.S. attorneys. "TPM Needs YOU to Comb Through Thousands of Pages," the blog's editors wrote to its readers. Dozens of people worked deep into the night, reading through documents and posting interesting snippets on the blog....McGonigal has a long list of plans for ARGs, like running giant international games that could bring together young players from, say, India and Pakistan. She's also talking with scientists at MIT about designing a game that folds in time-consuming scientific tasks. "We could have gamers teach [artificial intelligence] programs language and common knowledge as part of a game," she says. "It's basically applying supercomputing to AI development, which we've never been able to do, because we need people to be the supercomputer."
So, in short, the extra-super-Nobel-worthy achievement of these inventions is, um, ah, to wrangle unpaid labor from people on the pretext that it's a "game." Naturally, we at sugarhigh! could not be more excited, and are also looking forward to the ascent of drywall-hanging as an Olympic sport. Hey, we hear the next Olympics are in Beijing: the time for international competition as a thrilling recompense for cheap labor is now! And has been for a while!
Posted by jane at July 13, 2007 06:55 AM | TrackBack