Slay a monster, save a life. Playing your favourite game could help disaster relief efforts.
Online game World of Warcraft has 8 million players at any one time. Patrick Meier and his colleague Peter Mosur, who both co-founded the Internet Response League, want to tap into this resource to comb through the masses of digital information that accumulates during a real-world disaster.
"We could go through tens of thousands of data points in a short amount of time," says Meier. "Volunteers might be tagging tweets or rating images by level of disaster damage."
Tasks such as these are difficult without large crowds of human workers. Digital Humanitarian Network, a crowdsourcing network made up of volunteers, has already carried out work such as translation between English and Arabic for organisations like the Red Cross and the UN. But it only has a few hundred volunteers.
Speed tagging
"During Superstorm Sandy
So Mosur and Meier are working on incorporating such tasks into World of Warcraft. Gamers could choose to help sort through crowd generated images from ongoing disasters, labelling the damage levels they see to give emergency responders an idea of where they are needed – all without leaving the game. Players would receive quests to explore and tag damage in a virtual recreation of the stricken city – as well as slaying some monsters on the side.
"If we want to engage hundreds of millions of gamers in real-world problem-solving, we need to learn how to do it inside existing games, not outside of them. That's why the Internet Response League is such an impressive project," says gaming advocate Jane McGonigal. She adds that it makes more sense to tap into gamers talents within their favourite games rather than trying to convince them to abandon those games for the real world.
"Problem-solving within games like Minecraft, World of Warcraft or even Candy Crush Saga would be genius," says McGonigal. "It's the direction we really need to go. Saving the real world isn't a distraction from your favourite game. It's part of your favourite game now – that's where we want to be, and the Internet Response League could make it happen."
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
Have your say
Only subscribers may leave comments on this article. Please log in.
Only personal subscribers may leave comments on this article
All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.
If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.
