I dislike the term “serious games,” which implies that there is something that isn’t serious about, say, WoW. I’ll go ahead and suggest that a service that brings in ~$700 million/year in revenue and provides thousands of jobs (both within Blizzard and in multiple gold-generating operations) is a lot more serious than any game that has, to date, been produced with a purpose other than entertainment. In fact, I’m just going to refer to them as Alternative Purpose Games (APGs) until I grow tired of having to explain what I mean every time I use the term. I think APG sums them up much more clearly than ‘Serious’ does when trying to distinguish between games whose purpose is entertainment and games whose purpose is something else.

Many APGs suffer from a major problem: They’re just not very good games. In fact, many of them are somewhat beyond horrible. For instance, Ian Bogost of Persuasive Games, seems like a smart fellow with intentions in the right place, though I don’t know him personally. The media loves him too. The games of his I’ve played are pretty bad though, and judging by his site’s 900k+ Alexa ranking (higher is worse) it doesn’t seem as if his games are getting any traction at all. They all but beat you over the head with their political messages, sacrificing gameplay while doing so, and ensuring that few people will play them and thus they will have little to no impact. Not very serious to me, intentions aside.

I read a good article in Wired last night though about a guy named Luis von Ahn. (Among other things, he invented the CAPTCHA.) He’s an assistant professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, and he makes APGs that are truly serious. For instance, he did a game a couple of years ago called the ESP Game in which players are paired up with an anonymous partner and each is shown the same picture. The participants then have a fixed amount of time to type in as many words as they can think of that describe that picture. They get points for each word that matches one also typed by their partner.

The result of the game is that words co-tagged by both partners are ‘likely’ (though not certain) to accurately describe something about the image. Computers are pretty terrible currently at recognizing things in photographs but humans are very good at it. The results produced by the game were considerably more accurate than other image-search technologies were generating, and soon Google licensed the technology and launched it as the Google Image Labeler, which works to improve the accuracy of Google Image Search results. Essentially, his game is helping to make information more accessible to all of us. (I know I use Google Image search frequently.)

His newest game, called Matchin’ (not out yet), is even more interesting. In it, you’re once again paired with someone anonymous, but this time you’re shown two pictures and asked to pick which one you think both of you are more likely to find the most attractive. Every time players agree on a picture, it’s tagged as prettier. The idea is that since the human aesthetic has not yet been reduced to code in anything resembling an effective fashion, von Ahn can harness human players to build a database of images with varying levels of ‘prettiness.’ Someday Google may let you search for pictures of “hotels rated X or higher in prettiness.”

(On a non-game note, the thing he’s doing that fascinates me the most is called the reCaptcha. Instead of showing you one word to input when you register for a forum or whatever, it shows you two. One of the words the software knows and can recognize, while the other is a word scanned from millions of public domain books that has come out smudged and needs a human to recognize it. If one (or perhaps a few) people input the smudged word the same, chances are they’ve correctly recognized the word and thus is now ‘translated’, thus performing a valuable, if small individually, task.)

Persuasive Games and von Ahn (who will be launching Games With A Purpose this summer) are both making APGs, but I suspect von Ahn’s approach is likely to continue to end with far more ’serious’ results. He’s building his purpose into the most foundational layer of his games, whereas Persuasive Games (and most self-labeled ’serious games’ developers) are, largely ineffectively, layering political/social messages on top of games whose gameplay would work just as well in multiple genres.