Innovating Knowledge Production with Knowledge Games

Could we use games to create new knowledge? Can games help us not only help teach us the knowledge we already know, but also help produce new knowledge?

In this proposed presentation, I will discuss games such as Play to Cure, Foldit, Reverse the Odds, Foldit, EteRNA, and Happy Moths–all games that contribute new knowledge and enable large-scale human participation in real-world problem solving. Games such as Foldit enable people to fold 3-D representations of proteins, and have helped identify the structure of proteins implicated in HIV—leading to new medications and methods of managing the virus. In Play to Cure: Genes in Space, participants can play a mobile game that is ostensibly about space travel, but is also about helping to analyze real cancer data. These types of games, which I call Knowledge Games, help everyday players create new insights through a game, which are applicable outside of the game.

Games are often seen as time wasters, or even as actively causing social problems, rather than trying to solve them (Johnson, 2006; Wagner, 2014). This is distinct from learning games, because these games do not teach, for example, music concepts (Hein, 2014) or STEM skills (Bertozzi, 2014), but they actively contributing to our collective body of knowledge about the world. These games are more akin to games with a purpose (GWAP), crowdsourcing games, or citizen science games (Prestopnik & Crowston, 2012b).

In this presentation, I will also present a scheme for categorizing these games, and explain the future direction of these games.