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After reading Jane’s post about using time people spend fiddling with Facebook for solving problems with other (gaming) networks, I wondered whether there were other things you could do with all those idle hands.
What about Folding@home or Mechanical Turk tasks, as shown rather sketchily above.
Back in May, referring to Sony’s announcment that the folding@home client would be installed on the PS3, Alice wrote about “Games that do good”
“Are there games or game mechanics that could be used to fund-raise or awareness-raise?”
My quick mock up is not all that enticing or interesting, though touches like sparklines, league-tables and scoring could rapidly turn such things into more of a playful and engaging activity, turning all those idle hands to good causes.
Know of anything like this going on?
Petafloptimism 
I can’t think of a gaming example — but there was some talk for a while of using Captchas for human intelligence tasks.
I can imagine a sort of WarioWorld game that would be perfect for it — “Translate this!” “Identify this!”
I’m not sure if the games themselves are awareness-raising, but Louis Van Ahn’s research is around converting “idle hands” into large-scale problem solving.
RECAPTCHA is another of his projects, not so much a game but definitely an attempt to convert spare cycles into problem-solving.
mmmm… something tapping into the “tidying up” instinct feels like it might be a big winner too. Connecting tags up into meaningful pairs to create a giant brain of semanticishness.
Paulpod – That would be Chore Wars – “Finally, you can claim experience points for housework.”
heh, i like the idea of making it into a game – speed, accuracy, numbers of words…
a friend of mine started something like this (no game, tho):
http://www.worldwidelexicon.org/
I suppose the google image labeler qualifies as a gaming example with its highscore list. There also was a nice article on Luis von Ahn’s work in Wired a while back.
The Google image labeler game would be a good example I guess? http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/