They could, we just need to figure out how.

I recently watched an amazing TEDx talk by Luis von Ahn about massive-scale online collaboration through systems such as how reCAPTCHA uses a common Internet method of determining humanity to digitize books. This sort of crowdsourcing has elements of expectation that could be brought to bear in every sphere where a multitude of humans are already coming together to do a simple task—such as video games—and possibly even harnessed.

The Internet and the cloud are powerful democratizing forces—the Internet, as a resource, gathers millions of voices and eyes from around the world and directs them to each other. We’ve already seen surprising innovations in using the Internet’s crowdsourcing effect to do surprising amounts of work with the reCAPTCHA project: Google uses it to properly scan old books into digital form by using millions of eyes to read English in a way computers do a poor job.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking again with Amr Awadallah, the CTO of Cloudera, who has spoken to John Furrier and Dave Vellante in theCube before about the power of big data technologies and he reflected about how companies who run video game services such as those that allow players from across the world to engage in Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 use big data technology to assess customer retention and usage.

However, he mentions that there’s a great deal of data being generated here and there’s a lot of people playing these games for entertainment. Hours upon hours a multitude of people spend playing video games and all of that could be put to use somehow if only we found the angle.

Looking at the power of the reCAPTCHA project to OCR books using what is otherwise a waste of time for most people (filling out CAPTCHAs to prove that they’re human) the project with Google has managed to harness what people do every day on the Internet to do a staggering amount of work.

In what I think is a brilliant idea, Awadallah mentioned Star Gate: Universe. A science fiction show in which one of the characters is catapulted out of his Earthbound life of playing video games into exploring space because he solved an unsolvable problem in a video game. A problem put there by Star Gate Command to see if they could entice gamers to attempt to solve it (it involved some special math problem that would solve an issue that would allow said space exploration.)

If we were able to inject something like that into highly played massively-multiplayer online video games like World of Warcraft or DC Universe Online we might even see everyday people solving difficult modeling problems in science. It doesn’t even need to be an impossible-to-solve problem; it could be a small part of a much larger problem.

We’re Already Doing This; It’s Just Not “Interesting Enough Yet”

We’ve already seen some “social games” begin to deliver similar crowdsourced problem-solving outside of video games such as Foldit—a web portal and a game seeking teams of people to attempt to determine how particular proteins are folded. Through gamification, a social status system, and a reward system, the researchers who run Foldit have managed to solve a number of interesting, complex protein models.

If it were possible to break down large problems into small tasks that could be executed by video game players as either part of a larger game or part of a minigame we could harness the power of their time in these games. Perhaps it could be something as simple as identifying similarities between two models or some other simple task. Put together, a hundred people doing the same simple task can expand into a complex integration of behaviors.

Right now, most games like Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 don’t really have the mechanics necessary to invoke these sorts of crowdsourced microwork the way that reCAPTCHA does.

Humans are very good at intuitive pattern-based problem solving and many video games are based on just this and video gamers are virtually trained to do this well. So it makes sense that this is where we’d want to try out experiments in this first.