Play Brain Building Games To Make the Internet Smarter

While some may argue that online games play an important role in the internet’s popularity, most people would agree that these games serve little purpose other than to entertain their users.

GWAP (Games With a Purpose) proves otherwise.  Games themselves can actually play a part in making the internet smarter.

GWAP asserts that information gathered via gaming can serve to improve search engine functionality. Much like Microsoft’s Picture This, these games pair you up with a partner and present you with images & sounds to elicit subjective responses.  Essentially, the games ask you for your opinion.  So, in a certain sense, they are also like taking surveys.

Still, if they are surveys, they are fun surveys.

Who do they help?  Well, GWAP’s blog states that “GWAP.com is brought to you by the same people who created The ESP Game (a.k.a., the Google Image Labeler), Peekaboom and reCAPTCHA.”  Hopefully, GWAP still has an alliance with Google, and the information culled from our gaming efforts is shared with this intensely popular search engine.  However, GWAP does not explicitly state how or where its data is used.

Fortunately, the games are worth playing, and are even mildly addictive.

The Games You Can Play

Gender Guesser is a game that is featured on the homepage of GWAP.  This game presents a player with 10 chances to select a favorite between a pair of 2 pictures.  After choosing favorites from each set, the game will then attempt to determine the player’s gender.

While this game is fun to play, mostly because its pictures are visually stimulating, it hardly provides accurate results.  By playing the game, however, users generate useful data that allows GWAP’s creators to understand relationships between gender and visual preferences.

All of the other games hosted by GWAP pair players up with partners (presumably flesh & blood, as opposed to virtual).

Three of these games (ESP Game, Tag a Tune, & Verbosity) are similar in that they each require users to type responses to the clues they provide.  In the ESP Game, both you and your partner see the same image.  Your objective is to explain what you see in two words or less.  If your partner’s response matches with yours, you both receive points.  If not, you can either pass or continue to try.

Tag a Tune operates on this same matching principle.  However, you and your partner must decide whether or not the tunes you are each listening to are the same or are different.  You can both describe the tunes using single words, and when one of you is ready to decide, you are free to do so.

Verbosity is sort of like the popular television show Password.  You and your partner trade turns to either give each other clues or to choose a single word described by the clues.  Thus, if the word in question is “snowflake”, you may give your partner the clues “cold”, “winter”, & “tiny”.

Squigl & Matchin require players to use their mouse more than their keyboards.

Personally, I found Squigl a little annoying.  It asks players to circle a particular object in a picture, and then decides whether each player traced the object using a similar path.  The reason why I was annoyed by the game was because it seemed miscalibrated.  I was shown a picture of a baseball team and was prompted to circle “football”.  Next, I was shown a picture of a fish deep underwater, and was told to circle “sand”.  Maybe GWAP has a sense of humor.

The final game, Matchin, is in some ways the most fun.  Players must attempt to get into each others brains, and choose the same picture that their partners are choosing from a pair of options.  Just as in Gender Guesser, each player is presented with a series of paired photographs.  The objective of each player is to try to match their choices with each other.

For example, one of a pair of photos may be of a flower, while another may be of a building.  If you choose the flower and your partner does as well, you both receive points.  I like playing this game because it makes me feel psychic.  However, I’m not sure how the results of Matchin serve to make the internet any smarter.

Why Should You Play?

The biggest reason why you should give GWAP a chance is because it provides good, clean fun.  Its games are somehow reminiscent of early video games of the 80’s, in the best sense.  GWAP even sports Facebook functionality.  Pretty nifty.

A second reason to play is to receive prizes, although you’re not likely to receive anything.  Selected participants have won gift cards to Amazon.com.  Presently, you will need to gain a score of at least 50,000 points for the week in order to qualify for any prizes.  This sounds challenging, but each game you play will serve you with a ton of points in the span of a few minutes.

Hopefully, as time goes by, GWAP will supplement these prizes with other attractive options that are easier to win.  However, in the meantime, GWAP is still fun and there isn’t any worry that its users will simply be trying to game its system.

Tell us what you think about GWAP.  Is it too simplistic & too juvenille?  Or, do you think that its simplicity is its most appealing asset?  Are games with a purpose the wave of the future?