Games With a(n Evil) Purpose?
Posted by Richard on Thursday, 7 September 2006Bob Wyman points to a very fascinating video of Luis von Ahn speaking about "human computation". Very basically, through fun games, humans can do some things that those employed to do the task might do more slowly or that computers either can't do or will take a longer time to do. Though stalled, I've been reading about similar topics in The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul by Rudy Rucker: that many things around us, not just machines that we typically call computers, and including what we do, are computations.
I recently linked to Homeless: it's no game, which is indeed a game designed to help the players empathize with those on the margins (particularly those in in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver). Water Cooler Games is a good resource of games like that.
Neither Bob Wyman nor Luis von Ahn really address the games with a purpose that might be unethical. In an answer to a question at the end of the video, we hear that the games demonstrated (which he divides into two categories, asymmetric verification games and symmetric verification games) don't involve trickery, but what about games that do? Throughout the video, I thought of Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. (For those that haven't read and don't mind reading spoilers, read the book's Wikipedia page for plot details.) What are the implications of makers of fun games not telling us what the true purpose of those games might be?