Making Work Fun
Yesterday, I wrote a post about hearing Luis Von Ahn Ph.D. and his thoughts on human computation. Besides talking about using CAPTCHAs to accomplish work, one of the other concepts Luis spoke about was using games for business purposes.
As you know, I’m an advocate of using games in business. I’ve joked around that I’m going to create a workshop on using Facebook games as a business simulation tool…after hearing Luis, maybe it’s not such a crazy idea after all.
Anywho, Luis mentioned during his presentation that 9 billion human hours of solitaire were played in 2003. Compared to the 20 million human hours spent building the Panama Canal – that’s less than a day of solitaire. This isn’t shocking. Humans like to play computer games. But then the question becomes, when we think about the future of work, are there ways to use humans, technology and games to achieve business outcomes?
Luis shared with us a game he created called ESP. The purpose of the game is for players to match descriptive words to an image. The game is addictive (like Wurdle or Wordscraper). But while players are working to match words during the game…they are also labeling the photos found on the internet.
Yep, that’s right. It’s a game that’s working toward more accurate tags on internet photos. This “game” is now being used by Google to help label their search images. Check it out . . you can play along too!
I think this is very cool. Who wouldn’t want to work and play games at the same time? When we think about the future of work and our employees, we should find ways to create work that others would find satisfying and gratifying.
We need to change our mindset that work is drudgery. Work can be fun. In fact, it should be fun and we need to challenge ourselves to turn as many processes as possible into activities people enjoy.
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