Foldit | Gaming | Scientific Progress

Thoroughly enjoyed the following post from Andrew Mcafee highlighting the need to foster both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in games-based crowdsourcing communities. The same lessons  have been taught to the business community, that workers are incented by more than financial reward, they want to feel that they are contributing to something and have a clear objective surrounding their daily work; but that does not preclude the need to pay people well.  Equilibrium exists where a firm pays an individual a meaningful wage to do a task about which the worker is intrinsically committed.  Well worth the read for anyone interested in these new markets for ideas.

+Tim O’Reilly has sharp insights (as he always does) on the amazing successes of the Foldit community. Tim’s point is that players are primarily intrinsically motivated — by their love of working on hard spatial problems (particularly if they’re related to real scientific challenges) — rather than extrinsically motivated by their scores or positions on a leaderboard.

This sounds right to me, but I still think it’s very important that Foldit included mechanisms to activate extrinsic motivation. These mechanisms include scores; leaderboards, rankings, and badges; competitions and challenges; and so on.

We play games because games are fun, and because competition is fun. The one kind of fun does not drive out the other. Extrinsic motivation, in other words, does not drive out intrinsic, and the two are not fundamentally incompatible at all. Foldit gets this right, and shows us how fruitful it can be to bundle the two types together in order to attract people and energy.

(thanks to Paige Finkelman for highlighting Tim’s post to me)Tim O’Reilly originally shared this post:This article about gamers solving a thorny protein folding problem important in AIDS research is being touted as a triumph of “gamification,” the application of game mechanics to other problem domains. But there’s an important lesson here. Much of what is written about gamification (including some books published by my own company) focuses mainly on what I might call “the shallow end of gamification,” namely extrinsic motivators like points, leaderboards, and scoring. But game experts concur that the heart of most games is the intrinsic motivation of challenge and learning. And it is precisely that deep end of gamification that was on display here.

Yes, “winning” matters, but it’s winning at hard things - intrinsic motivation - that really matters. People aren’t stupid. Pasting scoring on trivial activities doesn’t make them less trivial. As Rilke said in his poem The Man Watching, “What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small.” We want to be challenged by vast, hard things.

The appeal of Foldit is that the problems it presents in spatial reasoning are challenging puzzles that force people to exercise their abilities. The fact that those abilities are put to work in a meaningful cause makes it even sweeter.

Any company thinking about gamification should think hard. Jumping in the shallow end of the pool is a great way to break your neck. The right place to jump is in the deep end.

J N O M I C S