Using Games to Tap Collective Intelligence

  8 Responses to “Using Games to Tap Collective Intelligence”

1. Aufero says:

   September 4, 2006 at 9:03 am

   Interesting speculation. I suspect there’s a catch he didn’t cover, though – crowd intelligence can fail (and fail spectacularly) when there’s too much information passed between members of the crowd. Members start to alter their opinions based on the opinions of others, which skews the results. The online communities that build up around any popular game would seem to promote exactly this kind of skew.

   Wonder if there’s a way to control for that?
2. Faith says:

   September 4, 2006 at 12:35 pm

   […] Comments […]
3. Prokofy Neva says:

   September 4, 2006 at 3:26 pm

   I think this is a lousy idea for the reasons Aufero said, and because game gods can’t help but always build into the warp and woof of every game their ideal vision of How Things Should Be. Their particular take on things, their demographics, class, experience, education, etc. all skew the very platform that you’re supposed to be using for some supposedly open-ended search. I think it’s very hard for them to build openness into their systems because they don’t believe in it. The die-hard clinging to the idea that their can’t be “no” in a voting mechanism, that only “positive proposals should be pushed upwards by supporting clicks,” is nearly impossible to dislodge from this ideology. So if you have really grimly-held, almost unhinged zealotry on some basic premises like that, starting with the very idea that the crowd is wise (when it’s more often like “the mob is dumb”), you will not get good results.

   Frankly, if I had cancer, I wouldn’t want gamers diagnosing me 60 percent of the time; I’d rather have real doctors.
4. Michael Chui says:

   September 4, 2006 at 3:31 pm

   because game gods can’t help

   *blink* Wait. Then why do you even bother talking?
5. Raph says:

   September 4, 2006 at 3:36 pm

   The cancer case is actually telling — the gamers are nearly as good as the doctors, if you get enough gamers together. And the more gamers you get together, the more accurate they will be. You just have to not let them talk to each other.

   The trick in all of these cases is to avoid having the game gods define the content, really. Use the game just as a way to aggregate the number of people you need.
6. Amaranthar says:

   September 5, 2006 at 6:19 am

   I don’t know how you can stop people from talking, given time they will find themselves, and if you take the effects of time out of the simulation you change the human element drastically.

   I also don’t know how you can insure that the creators don’t , perhaps unknowingly, prejudice the outcome.

   But it would make for a great element to a game anyways!
7. Allen Sligar says:

   September 7, 2006 at 10:23 am

   There is a problem with aggregating common sense and opinion, not expertise and specialization. What’s the difference?

   The difference between a good oncologist and a bad one is life and death. What makes a good oncologist good? An MD license? No. Board certification? No.
   Diagnostic skills, practice patterns, expertise and depth of knowledge of the subject matter? Yes.

   In fact if my good oncologist isn’t available give me a the bad one (at least there will be empirical knowledge based on exposure to the topic), any day over even a general practitioner, and so on down the line…to physician assistants, nurse practitioners, oncology nurses, regular nurses…if none of those are around give me a veterinarian…but a group of gamers?

   You can aggregate guessing, common sense, opinion and these are valuable insofar as they relay information, but it should not replace expertise and specialization. There is granularity to every subject matter that requires well trained decision making processes. Aggregated opinion says nothing and is invalid without applied knowledge making it actionable.

   The price of gas effects food costs, legislate a cap on prices and watch the interdependencies happen (policy implications are not some fictional made up crap talking heads on the TV spout every evening, they are actually real)

   The price of energy would be cheaper if we made it an open market, remove the regulation and watch the results of the aggregated behaviors of market forces. (Market reactions)

   A patient has a Brain Tumor (and Diabetes and Liver Failure) but if we give them Chemo they’ll die. So we do surgery instead… (Physiological and disease process interdependencies)

   We need a travel system in our MMO, we cant let players go wherever they want on flying mounts because players will exploit and there are development costs. Lets put in flight paths…

   Aggregates and the wisdom of crowds could trump this decision making process sure, and maybe perhaps come to the same results (good and bad) but do we really want to replace specialization, expertise and depth of knowledge about a subject matter with aggregated wisdom of crowds when dealing with a granular subjects with multiple interdependencies.

   All systems are complex, and they all require knowledge and time to master, the wisdom of crowds can give us data about how people either interact with or value certain systems, it should never replace informed decision making.
8. Game Tycoon»Blog Archive » Using Games to Tap Collective Intelligence (Part 2) says:

   November 8, 2006 at 9:43 am

   […] Remarkable stuff! Raph also happened to blog about my article. Some of the comments on his post are worth drawing attention to: Crowd intelligence can fail (and fail spectacularly) when there’s too much information passed between members of the crowd. Members start to alter their opinions based on the opinions of others, which skews the results. The online communities that build up around any popular game would seem to promote exactly this kind of skew. […]

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