Game mechanics are incredibly powerful tools for engaging users.  Their use is spreading across fields quickly, especially in the last few years, as we see a plethora of companies use rewards based on engagement, such as receiving badges or becoming mayor in foursquare.  So far, most of these have revolved around geting people to become active participants, so that they can be advertised or sold to, though it has also been used for more positive purposes, such as motivating students to learn through tools like The Khan Academy.  A recent project to arrise out of MIT uses this logic to build a game system that helps towards social and environmental good.  Greenbean recycling rewards people for every item they recycle, and allows a healthy dose of competition to get people recycling more than they may have otherwise.

The new company, which won an innovation prize this week from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, has converted a beefy recycling machine on MIT’s campus into a point tabulator of sorts. When students approach the high-tech trash can to dump in their recyclables, they punch their phone number on a touch screen. A bar-code reader in the machine counts the number of cans, bottles and the like that the person has dropped off – and then uploads that data to Greenbean’s website.

Recyclers can track their progress online, and even engage in competitions with fellow students.

“We want to be like the Zynga of recycling,” said CEO Shanker Sahai, 38, referring the maker of such social games as “FarmVille.”

Competitions between fraternities at MIT have been particularly fruitful, he said, with the houses trying to compete against each other to get the top spot on an online recycling leaderboard.

Is is almost a more specific version of RecycleBank, who gives rewards based on doing environmentally positive acts, which may have the benefit of a narrowness of focus.  While points are great, and people do like rewards, getting achievement just for achievement’s sake can be fairly hollow, especially if the end result is just another way to try and sell you something.  One trend that we have talked about recently is that people are looking for rewarding engagement, where their achievements have a positive impact on themselves and the world around them.  This is exemplified by the communities of people who dedicate their time to sites like Wikipedia, or working on opensource software projects, where they are contributing not because of financial gain or some other type of traditional reward for hard work, but because they want to contribute to a project bigger than themselves.  Carnegie Mellon computer science profesor Adrien Treuille has combined game mechanics with the pursuit of a higher goal, and has helped create two games, Foldit, and EteRNA.

What is impressive about this is not just that people are dedicating their time to gamified scientific research, but that they are making groundbreaking discoveries in the process.

His aim is to make super-boring-sounding scientific mysteries like “protein folding” and “RNA synthesis” fun and challenging for gamers.

The results have been staggering, as Foldit and EteRNA players — there are about 430,000 of them between those two games, most of them playing Foldit — continue to make discoveries that had eluded scientists and their supercomputers.

Earlier this month, for example, Foldit players helped solve a puzzle about proteins that could further research into HIV/AIDS. Their work was co-published in the journal Nature. [...]

“Proteins are these esoteric things that most people don’t know very much about, but through computer graphics and interaction we were able to make them something you can play with and wiggle and pull — and make them physically real for people. And I think that realness — that toy-like aspect of proteins — is what made it ultimately comprehensible to our players, and allowed them to solve problems that elude computer programs.” [...]

“What we actually do is give the players very simple tasks like build a circle, build a star,” he said. “These are tasks that are beyond the limits of science today, but through trial and error and being able to play with real molecules through this computer game, people have been able to figure out how to solve these tasks, which is sort of extraordinary.”

Treuille has high hopes for gaming’s potential to unlock good in humanity — and impact the real world.

“People can solve much more complex problems online at the edge of human knowledge,” he said in a PopTech speech, “and I think we’ve just scratched the surface.”

Imagine if a fraction of the collective energy that is currently invested in playing World of Warcraft or creating YouTube response videos was instead targeted at solving these puzzles that are out of the reach of computers or the manpower of the scientific community.  Distributed computing has been around for a while, where you can donate your computer’s idle processor time to chugging through blocks of data, but this is very passive.  This new model allows people to make real discoveries, and make tangle, discreet contributions to the scientific community, all while engaging through an entertaining, non-intimidating game interface.  Going by the reactions of people so far, it seems like there are people out there who would rather spend their time playing games that fight Cancer and AIDS than Orcs.

Via CNN and CNN