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Distributed Casual Game Power

January 26th, 2007, By Duncan Gough

I played with the Google Image Labeler when it was released and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a multiplayer casual game that is ‘easy to learn, hard to master’, naturally, but part of that difficulty can be attributed to the maxim, the problem with multiplayer games is the other player.

However, having just read this O’Reilly article that links together the Google Image Labeler with this video presentation by Luis von Ahn, I’m beginning to see Casual Games in a new light.

At about 7 minutes into the talk, he makes a staggering assertion about the amount of time spent on casual games: in 2003, 9 billion hours were spent playing solitaire. By comparison, it took only 7 million human hours (6.8 hours of solitaire) to build the Empire State Building, and only 20 million human hours (less than a day of solitaire) to build the Panama Canal.

It seems that the ESP game, which became the Google Image Labeler, is not an attempt to make a game out of a boring, repetitive task (labelling images on the web which not even Google can write software to do better than humans), but it’s a prototype – a way of determining whether humans can experience a Casual Game and yet have that ‘downtime’ converted into something useful. Just like the idea of harvesting footsteps through turnstiles to create energy, this is Distributed Casual Gaming – a kind of Seti@Home for games. So, does this mean that the rumoured Google Earth MMO is going to be a way to suck up hours of gameplay where users are encouraged to label the world and everything around them (for fun and profit), as a kind of Mechanical Turk of Identification? Woah!

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