Crowdsourcing knowledge through gaming

No one wants to hear “I don’t know” anymore.

And it’s no wonder, as knowledge seems like only a hop, skip, and a Google search away. Why is the sky blue? I bet Wikipedia knows. What’s the best bar for a first date? There’s an app for that. Who will win the election? Big data can tell us.

With new scientific discoveries being made on what feels like a daily basis, we sometimes take for granted that there is still a whole heck of a lot we do not know. That’s why, when we are faced with a shrug from a doctor or a Google search that came up short, we start to panic a bit. We mistakenly believe that our 2.0 version of the wise old elders—the Internet—will keep us safe and on a predictable course through life.

Yet, why don’t we know how to feed the world’s population or supply medicine to all who need it? How do we build sustainable environmental practices? Why can’t we figure out optimal health care, economic, or family-leave policies? How do we settle disputes between countries or reduce bullying? How do we best help those suffering from depression, PTSD, or grief?

Part of the reason is that these are extremely sticky and ever-changing problems, or what Horst Rittel and Melvin M. Webber once described as “wicked problems.” Another reason we cannot solve them now is because of how we have designed human society. We are often bounded by discipline, mindset, role, class, politics, or nationality, to name a few, but to better solve wicked problems, we need to traverse such boundaries, interact, and share our unique perspectives. To innovate more effectively, we need lots of people coming together from different fields, backgrounds, experiences, and types of expertise.

Companies, organizations, and researchers have started to see the benefit of bringing people together to help solve real-world problems. For instance, InnoCentive invites scientists and amateurs to work on real-world scientific challenges. Zooniverse, an online crowdsourcing platform, invites visitors to offer observations of galaxy images (in Galaxy Zoo) or to annotate war journals from World War III (in Operation War Diary). What’s the Score at Bodleian, by the University of Oxford’s Bodelian Library, asks people to annotate digitized music scores online.

As it becomes increasingly more difficult to innovate, we may even rely on video games, which can act as a dynamic sandbox where different people can come together and play. For instance, Carnegie Mellon and Stanford University collaborated to create EteRNA, an online game where players can design new RNA molecules. In Seung Lab’s EyeWire, housed at Princeton University, players map neurons, and in Giant Otter’s SchoolLife, players help unravel bullying behavior. While these games may not have the bells and whistles of Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, they can bring together game players to do things that a computer cannot do as well—such as find patterns, manipulate images, or identify anomalies.

Of course, the more people contributing knowledge does not always mean the merrier. As we saw with Microsoft’s TayBot, a crowd of people can provide lots of knowledge but not necessarily wisdom. After just 16 hours following its launch, the artificially intelligent chatbot was tweeting hateful, racist, and sexually charged messages, based in part on what it learned from human beings and human creations.

It is a lesson foretold well in a 1967 short story by Harlan Ellison called “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” In it, an artificially intelligent computer called AM, which was created to fight a world war, builds enough knowledge to destroy the world. AM personifies what happens when data, knowledge, and information has no humanity.

As we move forward finding new and effective ways to create and use knowledge, we need to ensure that values, stories, playfulness, and imagination are still a part of the knowledge-making. Perhaps video games—if appropriately and ethically designed, used, and played—could be one way to do so.

Maybe one day when we ask how to solve world peace or reduce poverty, instead of shrugs, we can answer, “there’s a game for that.”

Karen Schrier is an assistant professor of media arts, the director of the Play Innovation Lab, and the director of the Games and Emerging Media Program at Marist College. She is the editor of the Learning, Education, and Games series. Her new project, Knowledge Games: How Playing Games Can Solve Problems, Create Insight, and Make Change is available now.