/spanspan class="byline byline-photo" img src="/media/images/53259000/jpg/_53259344_katia2.jpg" alt="Katia Moskvitch"span class="byline-name"By Katia Moskvitch/span/spandiv style="float:right;width:305px;display:inline;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;" div id="emp-13847147-16296" class="emp"div class="warning" img width="326" title="BBC iPlayer holding image, view original article for media" src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53532000/jpg/_53532293_digitalkoot.jpg" alt="Digitalkoot" /div/divp class="caption"How Microtask's Digitalkoot game helps weed mistakes out of the Finnish National Library's e-archives/p/divp class="introduction"One more step, and a tiny creature will cross the bridge and get to safety./p pJust one more step - but letters do not match, the fragile structure blows up and the brown mole falls into a digital abyss./p pBut as Juha Valtamo, a 21-year-old Finnish student, correctly types the next word that appears on the screen of his laptop, another mole happily reaches the destination./p pDigitalkoot may sound like a typical online game - but there is more to it than just building bridges and saving moles./p div class="story-feature wide "div style="float:right;width:305px;display:inline;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;" img src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/49334000/gif/_49334930_tob304.gif" width="304" height="80" alt="Technology of Business" /diva href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11428889"Special Report: The Technology of Business/a a href="/news/business-13702953"3D: From cinema to cereal box/a a href="/news/business-13667229"Qatar 'may become' new tech hub/a a href="/news/business-13632206"Business discovers the 'web of things'/a a href="/news/business-13581453"Outdoor advertising goes digital/a a href="/news/business-13553454"Can anyone build their own app?/a a href="/news/13505966"Africa's technology revolution/a a href="/news/business-13451990"Cloud computing: ready for primetime?/a/div p id="story_continues_1"Every time players complete a level, they help with a real-life task - digitising huge archives of Finland's National Library./p pDeveloped by Finnish start-up business Microtask, Digitalkoot - which means digital volunteers in Finnish - combines two very hot trends in today's business world: gamification and crowdsourcing. /p pWords that players need to type come from millions of pages of newspapers, magazines and journals, digitised by optical character recognition. /p pBut since machines are prone to make mistakes, a human eye is necessary to weed them out./p pWhile playing, gamers inadvertently cross-check each other, thus ensuring complete accuracy of the word before it gets the final approval./p p"It's fun and addictive as a game itself, just like many other mini-games online, but I don't feel like I'm wasting my time because I know I'm doing something helpful," says Mr Valtamo. /p p"At the university, I've noticed how useful e-archives are, so I can see the immediate advantage of the project./p p"And I must admit that it's always nice to see my name and face on the top score board."/p pAnyone with a computer and an internet connection can play, he says, and don't worry if you don't speak Finnish - there is no need to understand the words. /ppAccording to research firm Gartner, 50% of companies that manage innovation and research will use gamification - the use of game-play mechanics for practical applications - by 2015./p div style="width:280px;float:right;clear:right;font-size:13px;text-align:right;margin-right:20px;"blockquote style="font-weight:bold;font-size:16px;"p class="first-child"ldquo;In Digitalkoot, we have people playing games - and as a side-effect they do useful workrdquo;/p/blockquotespan class="quote-credit"Ville Miettinen/span span class="quote-credit-title"CEO, Microtask/span /div p id="story_continues_2"One of the pioneers of the trend in its modern, digital-era shape is Luis Von Ahn, the man behind a tagging tool, ESP./p pThis online game was later bought by Google and became known as Image Labeler. /p p"It all started in 2002, when image-search used file names and html text - so if you searched for a picture of a dog on Google, you got lots of pictures that somebody named dog.jpg or dog.gif," says Mr Van Ahn./p pThis was not very precise - and he decided to get people to add tags - brief one-word descriptions - to improve the search./p pTo motivate users to label millions of photos floating on the web, the young entrepreneur turned it into a game. /p p"It's a two-player game. When you go on the website, you get randomly paired with another player," explains Mr Von Ahn./p p"The goal is to guess the exact same word as your partner, given that you both see the same image. /p p"Turns out that the best strategy is to type a lot of words related to the common image, until the words of player one are the same as the words of player two. /p p"Once that happens and the players agree, they get points." /p pBut Microtask's founder and CEO, Ville Miettinen, says that his company's approach is slightly different. /p div style="float:right;width:305px;display:inline;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;" img src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53388000/jpg/_53388498_esp.jpg" width="304" height="240" alt="ESP game"span style="width:304px;"Web users played ESP to label pictures on the internet /span /div pWhile Image Labeler and crowdsourcing firms, such as CrowdFlower, use game mechanics to get users to do real work, "they are not playing games - they are completing fairly trivial web-based tasks", he explains./p p"In Digitalkoot, we have people playing actual computer games - and as a side-effect they do useful work."/p pA similar example would be Fold.it - an online protein-folding game that lets you fold digital proteins./p pBy playing, you contribute to a remarkable collection of new protein structures - and help scientists get closer to curing diseases like Alzheimer's and Aids./ppBut the concept of gamification is more than using the masses to complete simple tasks./p pEssentially, it could be defined as applying a competitive game-like setting to any non-game business model to create loyalty, increase the value of the client or generate new ideas./p pThe word might be new, as well as its applications in today's digital world - but people have been exploiting the notion of tackling a boring task with game mechanics for ages. /p pWe all know it is always easier to get a child to do something through play./p div style="width:280px;float:right;clear:right;font-size:13px;text-align:right;margin-right:20px;"blockquote style="font-weight:bold;font-size:16px;"p class="first-child"ldquo;With Foursquare, you check in somewhere and get points - and participating companies offer you rewards for checking inrdquo;/p/blockquotespan class="quote-credit"Brian Burke/span span class="quote-credit-title"Gartner/span /div p id="story_continues_3"And it turns out that adults are keen on playing, too./p pReal-world examples would be a supermarket or airline loyalty programme - the more money you spend, the more points and rewards you get. /p pComputers, the internet and mobile devices are the companies' dearest friends when it comes to "gamifying" different situations to motivate people, or to change behaviours in a particular way. /p pSome firms use them internally - getting employees to generate and develop ideas through game-like applications, and rewarding them with virtual badges or prizes./p pOne example of success could be the UK's Department for Work and Pensions' Idea Street./p pThis social-collaboration platform is essentially an internal market game, inciting workers to invest in ideas - and develop them to the point they are ready to be implemented. /p p"It is different from age-old suggestion box," says Gartner analyst Brian Burke./p p"Here, people actively participate in idea development, self-select the ones that will get invested in the most and get the most collaboration on."/p pAnd it works - according to Gartner, within the first 18 months, some 4,500 workers have used Idea Street - and have generated 1,400 ideas, 63 of which have got implemented./ppThere are also businesses that eye the concept in a much broader sense./p div style="float:right;width:305px;display:inline;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;" img src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53388000/jpg/_53388502_luis.jpg" width="304" height="171" alt="Luis Von Ahn"span style="width:304px;"Luis Von Ahn is one of the pioneers of applying game mechanics to crowdsourcing/span /div pThey go external - and aim either to interact with their existent client base, or get new customers./p pOne of the most famous examples is probably Foursquare, a location-based website that uses game mechanics to drive the site's users to real-life merchants, Foursquare business partners. /p p"You check-in somewhere, get points, become a mayor - and participating companies offer you rewards for checking in," says Gartner's Brian Burke./p p"For example, you can get free coffee when you check-in at a local coffee shop."/p pAnother famous site that successfully connects gamers with businesses is Stardoll - a teen-oriented web page where users create an avatar of themselves and then go shopping for virtual clothes with virtual money./p pThe catch is that although things they buy online are virtual, the brands are very much real. /p pHaving dressed up the avatar into a cool-looking Miss Sixty mini-skirt, the player may be far more willing to go on a real shopping spree to the brand's nearby store the next day./p pBesides innovation, employee performance and marketing, Gartner outlines a number of other areas where gamification is likely to boom in the years to come: training, health and social change./p pAt the end of the day, we all like to have fun - and in our digital and increasingly mobile world, gamification is proving to be just the right tool to guide that fun down the right channels. /ppThis article is from the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk" title="Link to BBC News"BBC News website/a. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/k8iz-67s0FEAWwFJrdJf59oxCTY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/k8iz-67s0FEAWwFJrdJf59oxCTY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/k8iz-67s0FEAWwFJrdJf59oxCTY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/k8iz-67s0FEAWwFJrdJf59oxCTY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BbcNewsTechnologyFullFeed/~4/gc7_HCi1mNk" height="1" width="1"/