Game theory
Quick, Google a picture of two seagulls next to a rock, with a woman in a red jacket in the foreground. Not too easy, is it? The problem, of course, is that images aren’t indexed by their content; while text is machine-readable (ergo machine-indexable), image indexing still requires the Mark I Eyeball.
One solution: throw automation out the window and crowdsource the tagging task to a bunch of humans. Amazon has had success in doing this with its Mechanical Turk, which pays a small piece rate to folks in exchange for performance of “human intelligence tasks” like image-labelling.
Google, though, has been pursuing a different strategy, one I’ll call the “fence-painting technique,” after Tom Sawyer’s famous exercise in motivational psychology. Google lets users play a game in which they try to add more tags to an image than an opponent. Google keeps the valuable image information, and players get…um, points. That’s right, users do a Human Intelligence Task that they’d get paid for over at Amazon, for free.
The power of games to motivate is profound. It’s this realization (hardly a new one) that’s fueling much of the growing interest (and debates) in educational gaming. “If we could get Johnny to concentrate on physics the way he does on Guitar Hero…”
The trick, though, is to not stop with motivation. Sure, there’s some value in a game that makes it fun for Suzie to memorize her multiplication facts. But I think that educational games have a lot more to offer, particularly when we get into simulations. While I doubt they’ll replace classrooms entirely, I think open-ended games that move beyond skill practice—”software toys,” to use the great term Will Wright coined to describe his seminal SimCity—do have transformative potential. When I see projects like the UW’s epistemic games, I see a lot more going on than just motivation—I see critical thinking that transfers accross the curriculum, combined with real subject-area learning.
I like Clark’s thought that games may be a qualitative leap in teaching of a kind that hasn’t been seen in a long time. I disagree that simulations are entirely revolutionary (there are plenty of pre-computer sims; think martial arts practice with wooden swords, for instance) but there’s no doubt that computing gives us a great chance to make this more real. When games exploit the synergies between motivation and simulation, I think we’re going to see exciting things.
photo by musebrarian
