The evolution must start from both sides: 1.) taking business applications and making them gradually more fun to work with (why has SAP to be so boring???) and 2.) taking games and using them to do “meaningful” (whatever that means) tasks as described in this post and its comments. The idea to add some of the collective intelligence by Jenkins to the mix is great!

My vision for the future is all the world doing fun stuff all day long and by doing that sustaining the economy and enhancing the collective wisdom :o). This might sound like utopia, but if you think of the weired ways games and “real” life already interact today…

At the core, what you’re talking about here is finding interesting (and valuable) real-world applications for the decisions made by a mass of gamers. In Spore, if I understand correctly, the creatures you make (decisions) can become the basis for NPC races that other Spore players come across in their explorations of space (real-world applications). Additionally, it could be argued that the value add that this pollinated content brings to Spore will lead to more sales and a happy EA — perhaps not as noble as some of your examples, but moving in the right direction.

An additional thought I had on this matter is in line with your ‘major design challenge’ point. A big reason games like SimCity can be as accesible (and succesfull) as they are is that they take the complex (city planning) and streamline it to a much more managable level. Anything that isn’t ‘fun’ about running a city is left out of the game (as it should be). My question, then, is can a designer take a subject matter rife with ‘boring’ tasks/decisions, turn it into a game that focuses on fun (so that it will amass enough players so as to give value to the wisdom of the crowd) while still allowing the developers to collect viable and applicable data for the real world. Would you really feel comfortable proposing a new zoning restriction for LA (taking into consideration all of the political, financial, moral and ethical issues) based off of the group-think of even a million SimCity gamers? It seems to me like what they would be proposing (indirectly) would almost certainly be an idealist situation that could never work due to all the stuff that _needs_ to be taken into consideration but that _isn’t_ fun to play.

I don’t mean to harp on one specific example of yours (especially since you asked us not to) but I simply mean to reinforce the point that the ‘design challenge’ of this might be an understatement. Real world = hard & complex. Games = fun and ’simple’.

Great read, though. Really got me thinking.

http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-image-labeler-collaborative-tagging-game

I’d argue this isn’t just wisdom of the crowds – it’s Grunt-work of the Crowds :-)