Games which impact the real world

The exercise in today’s class about games that would change the world made me consider the different categories of games that I thought would be significant enough to “change the world”. One of the categories I came up with was games which have some sort of corresponding effect in the real world to your in-game actions.

One game I’m aware of which currently does a version of this is Eyewire, a game which uses crowdsourcing to attempt to map the neural connections of a human brain. Concepts like Eyewire would in my opinion certainly have the potential to use video games to change the world through harnessing people’s desire to play and using the time they spend playing to perform useful tasks.