Playing Nice: 5 Pro-Social Web Games

Rice from Shakespeare, how to help cure cancer, 60 million ways spam helps literature, a first-person snooper, and solid proof you may be the wrong gender.

In their quest for a share of our increasingly strained attention capacity, many charities and nonprofits have resorted to some rather atypical methods. Including online games, which let people contribute to a good cause simply by playing. Here’s our pick of the 5 coolest, smartest and funnest charity-benefiting games.

FREE RICE

You may recall this project from a while back. You may even have a slight FreeRice problem — the thing is positively addictive.

“The thing” being a neat little web game that tests your knowledge of various “advanced vocabulary” words SAT-style and donates 20 grains of rice to third-world countries for every right answer you get. Just yesterday, 72,724,400 grains were donated thanks to vocab junkies like ourselves, with over 50 million grains donated since the game’s inception a little over a year ago.

And the “game” is no joke either. Composed by professional lexicographers, it ensures maximum benefits for your vocabulary and aims to benefit people in the developed world as well by helping us sound smarter, formulate ideas better, make greater impact with our speech, score better on tests, and give better job interviews. The game even remembers your vocab level as you play, so it automatically adjusts the difficulty level to ensure you’re making tangible progress. There are 50 levels total, but getting above 48 is Shakespearean.

FreeRice is a sister site to Poverty.com and donations go through the UN World Food Program. And while 20 grains of rice may not seem like much, there are millions of people playing. Together, it’s a chip at the world’s enormous hunger problem that causes 25,000 deaths per day, most of them children.

The idea, needless to say, is pure genius. Talk about symbiotic benefit. Not to mention it’s certainly a better (as in funner and gooder) timesuck than watching random people’s cats fall into toilets on YouTube.

Go, be all smart and humanitarian. And check out FreeRice’s extended web presence on Facebook, MySpace and Think MTV.

Word up.

FOLD.IT

Hooked on House, Scrubs or Grey’s Anatomy? Here’s your chance to make your contribution to medicine without the drama.

fold.It is a brilliant game that lets your inner puzzle geek help advance key scientific research. How? You’re given a cool 3D model (which happens to be an actual protein structure) and you have to figure out the most compact way to fold it, competing against other players. That 3D model is actually scientists’ best guess as to how that protein may be shaped. Because proteins naturally take the most compact shape possible, finding an even more compact way to fold one completely changes any previous understanding of that protein.

Why is this important? A protein’s shape determines its function. So by helping discover the shape, you’re essentially helping scientist understand how a protein works, which enables them to target it with drugs.

Plus, it sure beats poring over grandma’s Manhattan skyline puzzle.

via GOOD

RECAPTCHA

Okay, so this one isn’t really a game. CAPTCHA, the ubiquitous anti-spam human filter, is more of an annoyance, really — spammers get annoyed that they can’t get their bots past it, and non-spammers get annoyed because, well, we’re not spammers and we have to waste time on it.

That’s exactly what inspired the guys at Carnegie Mellon University and the Internet Archive to put that colossal waste of humanity’s time — 150,000 hours of work each day, to be exact — to use. reCAPTCHA was born, a project that capitalizes on this human effort by helping digitize books written in the pre-computer (yikes!) age.

Here’s the tricky part about digitizing books the usual way — they’re first scanned, which turns each page into an image, and computer software attempts to turn the shapes of the letters into actual digital text. That’s called “Optical Character Recognition.” Which is cool, but it’s incredibly inaccurate.

That’s where reCAPTCHA comes in. It takes words that can’t be read by a computer and places them in those annoying little spam puzzles, so that actual humans help decode the text. It’s called human computation, and it’s absolutely awesome.

Like any large-scale wisdom-of-the-crowds approach, the average of millions of people’s guesses amounts to a virtually error-free result. (There are, after all, 60 million CAPTCHAs solved by humans around the world every day, just in the normal course of web-dwelling.)

The project is currently helping digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.

So if you run a website, especially a blog, grab reCAPTCHA for your site. And check out this interview with reCAPTCHA founder Luis von Ahn on Wired.

HOMELAND GITMO

When Boubacar Bah, a Guinean tailor detained for overstaying his visa, died in a New Jersey jail last year, human rights organization Break Through jumped on it with a rather unusual effort to raise awareness about the inhumane conditions of immigrant detention in the U.S. (We’re talking pregnant women being forced to give birth in shackles and HIV-positive patients being denied medication.)

Homeland Gitmo, a web-based video game, casts the player as a reporter seeking clues in the death of Mr. Bah.

It may sound hum-drum, but the investigation, the plot and the interface actually make for a pretty thrilling game. The reporter takes an undercover job as a detention guard and discovers things backed by links to real newspaper articles, court documents and other factual material.

This kind of first-person appeal brilliantly taps basic psychological principles for impact much greater than a mere article about the incident could have. To take it a step further, the site offers multiple ways to take action — finding your local Gitmo, speaking up online, and donating.

via The New York Times

GWAP

The web has its fair share of funny-sounding names (Squidoo and Google, we’re looking at you), but GWAP actually stands for something, literally: Games With A Purpose.

The outfit, out of Carnegie Mellon University, designs games for humans that help make computers a little more intelligent. It’s like that “human computation” thing we mentioned about reCAPTCHA, which is no surprise since reCAPTCHA mastermind Louis von Ahn is actually one of GWAP’s founders.

Currently, they offer 5 different games, all based on a pairing principle that randomly matches players up and gives each partner various tasks. Check them out:

• The ESP Game, which shows both partners the same image and asks each to guess what words the other is using to describe the image. Players win points for correct guesses. It’s essentially an image tagging effort, designed to make image search richer and more efficient.
• Tag a Tune, which is similar to ESP in structure, but obviously uses tunes instead of images and asks players to decide whether their partner is listening to the same tune based on words he or she is using to describe it.
• Verbosity, a Taboo-style game in which one partner, the Describer, has to describe a word giving clues to its meaning and the other, the Guesser, has to — duh — guess it. The game, surprisingly fun and addictive, aims to collect common-sense facts about words, stuff that’s strongly associated with a certain concept but wouldn’t be found in the word’s dictionary definition.



• Squigl, another image-based initiative, in which players are shown the same image and each holds down the mouse to trace an object their partner is describing. They get points if their traces match. It’s a genius concept that aims to help computers recognize objects more easily by their shape.
• Matchin, which simply shows players two images and asks them which one they like better. This one was the foundation of GWAP’s Gender Test, which promises to correctly guess your gender based on images you pick out of image pairs. (We regret to say it failed miserably on us, telling us with 70% certainty that we were the other gender.)

Tag a Tune is probably our favorite, party because we consider ourselves rather the musicologist types, and partly because music search is the least developed of the tag-based search genres and needs the most grassroots help.

So start playing nice and pick up a new favorite timesuck that scores you some karma points to offset the should-be-working guilt.

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Army Goes Ghost

What the U.S. Army has to do with Sarah Palin, the Terminator and Men in Black.

Holograms may be the stuff of CNN laughability these days, but it turns out the U.S. Army is working hard on the real stuff. According to Dr. John Parmentola, Director of Research and Laboratory Management with the Army’s science and technology office, they are “making science fiction into reality” using quantum computing.

Here’s the gist: There’s a special kind of photons that don’t bounce off of objects but off of other photons, which have bounced off of objects themselves. This causes the object to be reflected in the second set of photons, creating a “ghost” image. Hence, the technique name: “Quantum Ghost Imaging.”

The Army hopes to use it in confusing the enemy with objects rendered through smoke and clouds. And we thought ghost soldiers were the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.

The interesting part is that the military has been dabbling in quantum mechanics, neuroscience and robotics a lot lately, making nice with scientists and major research universities so they can grab revolutionary technologies before the general public.

Remember the Boston Dynamics Big Dog that shot straight to the YouTube top a few months ago? The technology was actually developed years ago and its possible military applications were first discussed by roboticist Rodney Brooks in his TED talk back in 2003. They’ve also dabbled in stem cell research for “growing back” body parts, turned to neuroscience for memory-erasing amnesia beams, and looked into controlling robots with nothing but thought.

Creeped out yet? You should be — it’s scary, Big-Brother-meets-Terminator stuff. But it’s also exciting to observe the mind-blowing scientific and technological progress of our day. That, and we loved the amnesia beam in Men In Black.

via Fast Company

Geek Mondays: Dating Data Art

Why 1.7 million people yearn to have their balloons popped every day and what the MoMA has to do with matchmaking.

Jonathan Harris, of We Feel Fine and The Whale Hunt fame, is one of our all-time favorite data artists working in what we like to call “information aesthetics.” His ability to take pure information and transform it into pure visual magic is the epitome of modern concept art. And his last project is nothing short of that.

I Want You To Want Me explores our quest for love in the now mainstream world of online dating, which draws over 1.7 million web romantics every day. The project, commissioned by the MoMA, dissects the personal dating profiles, which themselves are meticulously curated presentations of how we’d like the world to see us and what we’re looking to find in it.

The interactive installation is displayed on a 56″ high-resolution touch screen hung vertically on the wall of a dark room. Visitors can control the weather on a digital sky, where hundreds of balloons float. Each represents a single dating profile and is coded for gender and age by color (blue=male, pink=female) and brightness (bright=younger, dark=older). Inside each balloon is one of 500 video silhouettes, showing a solitary person engaged in a particular activity listed in their dating profile — yoga, air guitar, jumping jacks, you name it. Viewers can move the balloons inside the sky at different speeds, activate thought bubbles for the people trapped inside them, and even pop them.

The installation pulls data every few hours from dating profiles all over the world. Each movement highlights a different facet of online dating: Who I Am explores the revelation of the self, Taglines takes the taglines of people’s profiles and puts them in a DNA-like helix symbolic of human identity, Matchmaker offers a “resolution” of sorts by algorithmically matching people based on data from their online profiles, and Breakdowns offers insight into larger population trends from the world of online dating.

The project aims to offer us a glimplse of ourselves as we peep into the lives of others — a quest for self in the quest for love. It was installed at the MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine’s Day.

It is part of the brilliant, brilliant Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition curated by the ever-amazing Paola Antonelli.

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