One neat talk from SXSW came from Andy Baio of Waxy.org who discussed how game technology and methodology is becoming more prevalent in everyday life, and used several great examples. One was the recent parsing of U.K. Politician data by The Guardian.
The Guardian newspaper published over 700,000 pages of U.K. politician’s expenses online, and was able to get 20,000 volunteers to sift through the huge database of government paperwork by adding a status bar and other game components. The achievements, incentives, and competition involved in these kinds of gameplay games can, as Baio describes, be incredible motivators to make the “not fun, fun.”
In addition, he covered Microsoft’s “Ribbon Hero” game to push training & tutorials in Office, and Target’s checkout game to increase the speed of checkouts. One thing all of these have in common: Clever eye-catching visuals that distill the game-aspects (which are traditionally not very game-like) into well-known visuals.
As for me, I like to play such games where you can learn something new, or develop new skill. But there are few of them. Well, in fact yonger generation is very different from ours. When they graduate from Universities they’ll change this world. I hope it will be still comfortable for everybody to live in it.
The wii is a great example too.