Gamify is slowly coming out of its shell with a recent announcement of a partnership with setiQuest and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. setiQuest is an effort towards community involvement that will lead to a significant improvement in the ability to search for other intelligent civilizations in the cosmos. Gamify is supporting this effort with the Gamify Competition, calling on community participants to develop the gamification campaign of setiQuest.
To boil it down, Gamify has established an open forum for ideas on how to apply game mechanics to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. If your method is selected, you can win physical prizes, including an Astro A30 Audio System, as well as points within Gamify’s “Expert Network”.
The hard part is yet to come. There are many ideas on the forum currently, but the question remains, how will it be built and who is responsible for the extensive logic, testing, and iteration for an end-product? Crowdsourcing games have been proven in some cases such as fold.it, and contests and competitions in the public sector have shown some promise, but aligning the motivations of the community to the task is no easy feat. National Geographic’s Field Expedition: Mongolia was an innovative way to find patterns in the Mongolian steppe. Perhaps it can serve as a model for setiQuest Explorer to find patterns in radio transmissions.
It appears that in the spirit of the SETI community, Gamify is trying to create an open source method to motivate explorers with some extrinsic rewards. But in the end and on top of the sound-system, the winner may also have a chance of contributing to the discovery of alien life.
