Getting the Wisdom of Crowds Through Computer Games
Thanks to Ken Zolot for pointing me to this post by Henry Jenkins on "Collective Intelligence vs the Wisdom of Crowds" . Henry Jenkins rightly differentiates between the wisdom of crowds such as in prediction markets, and a more sophisticated way of working together through collective intelligence such as in Wikipedia, where people instantly get access to and can build upon each other's knowledge. In particular he talks about tapping into the wisdom of crowds through using online computer games to predict and make complex decisions. I think using multiplayer online computer games to predict and analyze the real world is a great idea. If this idea is taken seriously, developers of such predictive games might find our research results of interest, where we correlated social networking structures of gamers with their success in the game. What we found was that differently from the real world, the most successful gamers were the ones with the highest degree of connectivity,...