I just read an interesting article by Michael Hugos in CIO that has really got me thinking. If games are becoming more acceptable in the workplace, and we've got services like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, could it be possible that the two concepts converge into something like Gameplay As A Service?
In this scenario, workers would be in a game environment but would do actual work, and that work could be structured and packaged so that organizations could purchase the service in a manner similar to SaaS. Immediately science fiction examples of this come to mind, like the book "Ender's Game" and the movie "Sleep Dealer".
The thing is, all these pieces are in place, and people seem to be aching to do the work. I was recently given a demo of a virtual world that a friend built in a mining simulation game. The complexity and effort that was put into what he built was absolutely stunning. Couldn't (or perhaps even "shouldn't") that desire to create and build be put into the marketplace somehow?
