Using Games to Tap Collective Intelligence
I’ve been mulling over an idea for several months now. It goes something like this: Nowadays, everyone is talking about the broad potential applications of video games. Combating obesity. Managing chronic disease. General education. Employee training. Military preparedness and recruiting. The list seems endless. But one unique and important aspect of games has yet to be tapped: I believe they can effectively aggregate individual players’ actions into a form of collective intelligence. Basis of the Idea: Wisdom of Crowds First, a bit of background. Few things have become conventional wisdom so quickly as the Wisdom of Crowds, an idea that has captivated savvy businesses seeking to improve their internal prediction and decision-making processes. There’s great reason to believe the hype — just ask HP, which has used idea markets to generate more accurate sales predictions, or read about the Iowa Electronic Markets, which have predicted presidential election outcomes more accurately than the polls in 75% of cases. |





