Injoke

Gaming For Good: A Social Model

Chal writes:

could this FoldIt game be considered a form of social networking?

That is fascinating. I would be very interested in seeing the game. Protein folding is a very resource intensive procedure, I can’t imagine how they would devise a game that would enable gameplay to simulate folds… unless you must allow your computer to process some discrete unit of work in order to take a ‘turn’.

UPDATE: I played a few rounds of the game, and it appears to take advantage of the intuitive nature of people, whereas simulation application like Folding@Home might need to try every possible combination to be sure that it has an optimal fold. It’s fun to play, there are some automated tools that allow the player to guide the protein fold in the right direction and at some point the computer can make the final adjustments. Each move increases the puzzle score. Once you hit the score threshold set for that puzzle, you win and move on to the next. It’s an ingenious use of a competitive game model.

Is this social networking? The folding itself is probably not, but I bet they try to make it compelling by layering a social aspect on top of it. Any online application where you collect a group of contacts could be considered a social application. Probably even email or contact management to a degree. The real strength to these social media applications, in my opinion, is threefold:

• Creating a community of people that might never otherwise interact.
• Collaborations between the members of this new community being shared by the members and consumed by the online society at large
• The potential portability of these communities as new applications are created.

For example, a network of friends might have formed on the prototype social network, Friendster. Not much to do there, but if that network was described through some semantic markup to be shared with a collaborative writing application, or a music community like Last.fm, your online clutch can nomad themselves from application to application to use the best features of each–ultimately stringing together an idealized patchwork of task oriented tools that cause that community to flourish.

There is a lot of hype around the social aspect of Web 2.0. It *is* a lot of hype, but there is some really promising stuff that will remain after the gloss is removed.