Hey; you got work in my play!

It's no secret that for most of us, work isn't fun. That's why it's called work. It's an activity we do that, while it's often very productive for a company, a project, a creative expression, scientific advancement, or any other number of worthy causes, is generally not considered something we do for enjoyment. Now, of course there are a lucky number of people who find joy and pleasure in their jobs, and in the end, I think that's what we all want, but for the sake of this post, let's consider 'work' to mean your average, boring, nine-to-five-esque sort of deal.

On the opposite side of things, is the elusive little beast known as 'fun'. Fun and work rarely go hand in hand, at least to the point where you'll be able to convince someone to chose the latter over the former. But what if it could? What if there was a way to combine the productivity of work, with the pleasure and desire to keep playing of something that was fun? Would it be effective?

I think so. As the article (source) focuses on, there have already been several successful attempts made to harness our inherent need to do stuff that often has no real-world consequences, 'just because'. An example used is the internet-based game in which the player simply must identify what, exactly, is in a picture. This may seem mundane at first, but when you add a decreasing timer, and a running point tally, it becomes a legitimate game. And behind the scenes, the player is giving instructions to a computer program, essentially teaching the computer how to identify certain images in pictures.

The player accomplishes something meaningful - teaching a computer patterns to look for when identifying a certain object - and at the same time, he or she gets enjoyment and a sense of competition from the game. And let's face it, we aren't that hard to entertain. If Pong kept my parents occupied for hours on end, I'm sure modern games shouldn't have much of a problem in this sort of scenario.

However, I don't think that this sort of playing games with a purpose will catch on to any significant degree. I have no doubt that people will always be in need of quick games for entertainment, but the concept of fooling the player into doing useful work in more than a few, select applications is sketchy at best. If there is a tedious, repetitive task (such as manually identifying what's in a picture) that is quick and easy to do, then this seems like the perfect match. Otherwise, work will unfortunately continue to live a separated life from fun.

SOURCE:
http://www.rpi.edu/~freien/courses/comm4966/fall08/readings/ahn08games_purpose.pdf