Online Trends

Online gaming: designing the social ‘good’?

In an effort to “design new vaccines and make enzymes for repairing DNA in diseased tissues” the University of Washington has launched a new online game believing the opportunities for collaborative, ’social production’ will enhance current efforts.

A recent MIT Technology Review report highlights that the game - Foldit - has a number of interesting characteristics:

1 - It continues the theme of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk , namely, that humans are better than computers at seeing, interpreting and acting appropriately in relation to certain kinds of information.

2 - Unlike most conventional games, it is not designed with a fixed end-point or final goal in mind. Indeed, the most desirable outcome is simply unknown at the current time.

3 - Players behaviours will be tracked & used in an effort to establish successful future gaming strategies.

While this type of social production isn’t new it raises a key future theme: intellectual property ownership. After all - in this example - who owns the outcomes or intellectual property generated through the collaborative development? How do we reconcile this when the problem it’s addressing can simultaneously be regarded as both a social ‘good’ and the basis of commercial patent?

© 2008 Online Futures Group.