Instead of spending it binge-watching cat videos on youtube ;)

source: zooniverse

We humans tend to have a lot of "free time" hidden in plain sight, that we should honestly be doing something "productive" with.

Just think about the amount of time you'll actually watch those music videos on youtube, or re-watch an entire series on netflix to "catch up" when new episodes are released, simply because your leisure time isn't filled with much else, but you'd be damned if you'll do something mentally straining with that time.

It's leisure time, dammit !

Oh, of course, you could start a hobby, but that's hard.
Too close to actual work !

So, what to do with your mental capacity while relaxing, enjoying your leisure time at the computer, without too much effort , but still feeling like you've done something meaningful ?

gamifying Science

Gamification is when you take something boring, like RNA structure prediction:

Yaaaaaawn
source: wikimedia commons

and turn it into something that people would do... and do for fun !

Yes... playing a puzzle game helps science !

Zooniverse: Gamifying pattern recognition for data analysis

Zooniverse attempts to gamify our Pattern Recognition superpowers to help advance the state of research.

Oh, a lot of people still argue if Zooniverses projects count only as Crowdsourcing human mind power, or if it's actual Citizen Science. Most tend to point out that filtering data and recognizing patterns is more of a, well, precursor to actual Science, which is taking those patterns and interpreting them, then trying to establish a theory and prove it.
But that's a debate for another time.

Zooniverse focuses on making you recognize patterns.

Be it counting the number of new eggs a C.Elegans worm lays in a series of 30 second videos

Or understanding animal faces (This one was lot's of fun !!!)

So, no matter if it counts as Citizen Science, or you are just doing some scientist a favor by cleaning/annotating his data, it's certainly a more constructive pass time than watching cat videos !!!

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So, what do you think about the trend to gamify...well... everything ?
Should we be aiming to make everything inherently fun enough for people to do it without monetary rewards ?
Is that even possible ?

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Oh, and here's an excellent video on gaming in the name of SCIENCE: