The Computational Side-Effects Of Gaming

It had entirely escaped my attention that I recently wrote something for The Escapist. It's interesting, because I say word stuff wot read good. Like this:

What if games could do something practical while they entertain us? What if by playing games you weren't simply entertaining yourself and others, but adding to the grand sum of human knowledge? This is the idea behind an ongoing academic project entitled "Games With A Purpose." The project, which focuses on the work of a young assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon, Luis Von Ahn, has one specific objective: to create games with useful computational side-effects.

You can read the entirety of the piece just here. The conclusion is moderately lacking in lustre, due the original one having been cut thanks to an "editorial overlap", aka some other bugger writing the same thing a couple of months earlier. Bah.