Video Games

The initial phase of a DARPA program that used publicly accessible online games to accelerate the verification of software has helped produce hundreds of thousands of program annotations in common software programming languages, adding credence to the idea that digital games can be an effective means of crowdsourcing solutions to software problems. The results have inspired DARPA to launch a new round of games with the goal of extending the successes to date and learning more about the approach’s potential.

The explosive growth of global digital connectivity has opened new possibilities for designing and conducting social science research. Once limited by practical constraints to experiments involving just a few dozen participants—often university students or other easily available groups—or to correlational studies of large datasets without any opportunity for determining causation, scientists can now engage thousands of diverse volunteers online and explore an expanded range of important topics and questions.