Games With A Purpose? What the Heck are GWAPs?

Imagine playing a game that had the power -- not abstractly or symbolically, but definitively -- to make the world a better place. Really. Now stop imagining, park your browsers at www.gwaps.com and, you know, get to work.

Except it's not work, it's actually a game, or rather a collection of games. No kidding. Casual word association and matching games with titles like "ESP" and "Tag a Tune" and "Verbosity" that as you play siphon off results to accomplish tasks semantically obtuse computers simply can't. Call it GWAP, or Gaming With A Purpose. But whatever you do, don't call it "goofing around."

That's because it's not. It may be diverting, even mildly addictive, but it gets serious, quantifiable results. Results designed to "degauss" the noisy chaos of today's online info-labyrinth. Think of it a bit like the electric current that powers a bicycle light, battery free, generated in realtime as a consequence of cranking the pedals and setting a bicycle into motion. The electricity to power the light isn't "free" from a physical standpoint, but it's definitively free from a conceptual one.

Take GWAP's deceptively simplistic "ESP Game." After signing up for an account (it's fast and free, no validation required) you and a partner are presented with random images as a clock ticks down. Bound by a two-word maximum, you're asked to "tag" the picture based on "what you see." If you see a slightly messy bedroom with music equipment like drums and a computer, you might type "amateur studio" or "music lab" or even something a tad more eclectic like "jam crib."

When you and your partner agree on a tag, you move on and get points. If you don't seem to be agreeing, you can just pass and move on anyway. At the end of a session, GWAP records the tag matches and associates them with the images. According to GWAP, "Now a search engine will have a better idea of what's in those images." Short and sweet.

Now imagine whatever it is you're doing right now (at work, silly) redesigned as a form of interactive entertainment, where instead of sitting in tedious meetings or battling bureaucratic nonsense, you free associate ideas and accomplish determinative tasks (in particular, tasks oriented around categorizing or contextualizing data) by simply playing a game.

Time to rethink the old adage "all work and no play"?

I first read about GWAPs after encountering an article entitled "Designing Games With A Purpose" in the August issue of CACM (Communications of the ACM) by Luis von Ahn and Laura Dabbish. These two authors -- one an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, the other an assistant professor of information technology, also at Carnegie Mellon -- write in academic detail about an emerging form of entertainment in which people play "not because they are personally interested in solving an instance of a computational problem but because they wish to be entertained."

The article continues by analyzing existing GWAPs and outlining templates for would-be GWAP developers, then proposing metrics for maximizing GWAP success "per human-hour spent playing the game."

Fascinating. "Entertainment value" translated into a sort of "soft" currency, tradable for tangible, perhaps even profitable output. Symbiotic work-gaming.

Industrial psychologists, start your engines.

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