Nintendo Pokes Fun At Crowdfunding With Wario’s “Crowdfarter”

Image © 2013 Nintendo

Ask any musician that’s been parodied by Weird Al Yankovic, and they’ll tell you: you’ve only truly made it when someone parodies you. Which is why I’m thrilled to death that crowdfunding is such a big deal that videogame giant Nintendo has lampooned it to sell their new Wii U game, Game & Wario.

Crowdfunding was popularized by sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo that present underfunded projects for people to throw money at if they want to see them completed. Nintendo’s parody, the maturely-named “Crowdfarter”, copies elements from the source material in a manner that shows that Nintendo isn’t just trying to cash in on a buzzword. They’ve made a conscious effort here to find the funniest and most ripe-for-parody elements of crowdfunding sites, and to represent them through their “lazy greedy corporate slob” character, Mario’s unscrupulous brother Wario.

Wario is a great fit for this parody; he wants to cash in on the new Wii U system, so he needs a game to do it. But of course, he doesn’t want to pay his own money to make the game, and that’s where we come in. Through Facebook “Likes” and Twitter shares, Wario will “fund” his game and spread awareness at the same time.

Nintendo went to notable lengths to rip on crowdfunding as lovingly as possible. All the elements that make crowdfunding unique are here: we’ve got the poorly-produced introduction video, the lofty and over-hyped funding goal rewards, the updates from Wario where he professes that his project will be “the best Wii U game ever”, and the less-than-subtle indication that the entire thing is less about the final product and more of a huge cash grab.

This parody would feel disingenuous if done poorly, but Wario’s characterization is absolutely perfect for this campaign. He’s unarguably the type of character who would see a system like crowdfunding and immediately attempt to game it for his own self-interested and lazy purposes. Wario might have even inadvertently touched on a deeper crowdsourcing issue with one off-the-cuff line: “Why should I pay for everything when other people will do it for me?” The best parodies always contain a kernel of truth.

Well done, Nintendo. I don’t own a Wii U so I probably won’t buy Game & Wario, but this is a marketing home run.  Check out the parody site here, and throw Wario a Tweet or a Like if you’re so inclined. Goodness knows his lazy ass could use the help.

Haverhill Mayor: Report Potholes, Win Prizes, Improve Your Community

Image © 2013 David Joles, Star Tribune

Sometimes it’s good to remember that crowdsourcing efforts don’t always have to be huge, world-sweeping events that change the very nature of how our society functions. Sometimes, crowdsourcing just provides us with a neat way to improve the immediate world around us, and that’s exactly what’s happening right now in a town in Massachusetts.

James Fiorentini, the mayor of Haverhill, MA, has recently put out the call to the residents of his town: find potholes for us to fix, and get a chance to win one of three $25 gift certificates from local businesses. It’s a win/win/win proposition; the contest winners get free services and merchandise, the residents of the town get better roads, and the mayor can spend resources on fixing potholes instead of locating them. In his announcement, the mayor stated that he intends to fix all of the reported potholes within two business days of when they are discovered.

I personally think this is just swell. Potholes are a huge annoyance to anyone who uses a wheeled vehicle to navigate roads, and there is no shortage of people who are angry enough about them to report them. While some residents have correctly identified this to be the job of the Department of Public Works, I would image that it is difficult for that group to be prolific enough to locate every pothole by themselves. By recruiting regular citizens, they essentially get watchdogs on every street in every neighborhood. The added bonus of a specific phone number and email address to send these reports means they can all be grouped together instead of potentially getting lost in the shuffle of bureaucracy.

This project is also three-for-three on successful crowdsourcing tenets. There is a joint incentive for those participating; they get the guaranteed improvement of their neighborhoods and a change at some free local swag. Like successful campaigns before them, this one gives an outlet to those who were desperately trying to have their concerns heard and met. The barrier of entry is appropriately low, and the inclusion of both a dedicated phone number and email address for reports means that even technologically-impaired residents can participate. And the compartmentalization is about as straightforward as you can get; it doesn’t get much clearer than “tell us where the potholes are.”

Interestingly, some citizens are less-than-pleased at this announcement. The comments section for the initial announcement contains many who would like to see the DPW be a little more dedicated to their jobs, eliminating the need for citizen reports in the first place. I addressed this concern above, but the local commentariat has additional complaints that I think are a little more well-founded. Mainly, they think that the prizes offered are either insufficient or downright insulting. Some would rather see the money go towards repairing vehicles that have already been damaged by potholes, and others feel that the combined $75 total of prize value is a mere distraction from the fact that citizens are being asked to cover the perceived failures of their local government.

As an outsider to the intricacies of Haverhill political intrigue, my opinion of this story as a whole is generally positive. I would jump at the opportunity to similarly improve my own residential area, and seeing public officials at least attempt to connect with their constituents is heartwarming even if the execution is less than over-the-top. I hope this story gets some traction and other cities offer similar services in the future. It would make all of our rides a little smoother.

It’s Back! Magic: The Gathering Announces You Make The Card 4

Image © 1995-2013 Wizards of the Coast LLC

Turns out the number-one cure for the Mondays is your favorite company announcing the revival of an incredibly popular and successful crowdsourcing campaign. Game company Wizards of the Coast announced today that their trading card game Magic: The Gathering, of which I am a huge fan, would be beginning the fourth iteration of their You Make The Card (YMTC) project, starting immediately. Using the ideas and voting power of their fans, Wizards will create a brand-new card that will be released in a future set.

Like the last few contests, YMTC4 will involve an iterative approach. One decision at a time will be presented to the fans, and they will discuss, submit ideas, and vote on that aspect before moving onto the next one. This campaign starts with deciding what card type this card will be; the first three campaigns began by choosing the card’s color or art. It’s similar to the approach Nissan used when soliciting the crowd’s help to design a car.

I’ve previously discussed the past YMTC campaigns, so I’ll take this space to briefly reiterate why they were so popular and such a good example of a company effectively reaching out to their audience. Wizards expertly hits all three of the tenets of successful crowdsourcing:

• Since Magic research and development is usually very secretive and confidential, fans are incentivized by the rare and significant opportunity to be this closely involved
• The iterative way in which the contest is compartmentalized prevents the people running it from being overwhelmed with too many disparate ideas, and ensures that each part of the card will work properly with the previously-designed parts
• Hosting the campaign on the official website ensures that only people who are already sufficiently interested in Magic will find it, and that they will also have access to the massive archive of articles about Magic design that are hosted there.

I can’t wait to see what kind of crazy card we end up with when this contest is over. The first three cards designed by YMTC were fun to build decks around and provided effects that were previously underexplored in the game, so there’s no reason to believe this one won’t do the same.

Get in on the contest while it’s fresh and new by voting in the first phase and following the contest on Twitter under the #ymtc tag, and then pop down to the comments to tell me what kind of cool card you hope will be designed in the upcoming weeks.

 

EDIT 3/18/12 4:30pm EST: Thank you Maro for retweeting my article, and welcome all followers of Maro on Twitter!

SETI Institute Turns to Crowdsourcing to Name Pluto’s Moons

As far as names go, “P4″ and “P5″ are not very exciting, especially considering that they’re supposed to represent distant celestial bodies. The SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) thinks we can do better, and they want your help in picking a winner. They are currently hosting a poll on their website to determine which of 13+ names will end up attached to the two small recently discovered moons of the dwarf planet Pluto.

Dedicated readers will know that I’m not usually a fan of polls as a form of crowdsourcing; their options are too rigid, they don’t encourage discussion, and the options typically aren’t crowd-generated in the first place. I still feel that way, but it’s worth noting that SETI’s poll takes a few steps in the right direction.

The big thing to note is that SETI allows users to submit their own name idea if they come up with one and can argue it sufficiently. Already, William Shatner himself has added “Vulcan” to the list. I kind of love that William Shatner is spearheading the campaign to name chunks of space rock (scientific term) after Star Trek planets. But this has an additional layer of “cool” as well: Vulcan has a significance in Greek/Roman mythology as the god of fire and smoke, and also the nephew of (you guessed it!) Pluto.

I do have one gripe, and it’s that I’m a little disappointed there isn’t an available area for further discussion of this topic on the site. Even the comments sections on the blog posts are closed off to public discussion, which makes it harder to rally community support around favored names. For example, even though Vulcan is obviously the coolest possible name, it currently lags several thousand votes behind the front-runners because it wasn’t posted in the original listing.

Of course, the poll is registration-free and you can vote every day until it closes at noon EST on February 25, so for all I know, we really could come out of this with a place called Vulcan in our cosmic back-yard.

Do you get what I’m saying here?

Go vote for Vulcan, would you kindly?

Casey Armstrong: Saving The World, Going Open-Source, Turning People Into Robots

Casey Armstrong has been a busy man. Formerly the content director at Daily Crowdsource, Armstrong has recently founded his own company, VineStove. A crowd labor/ microtasking site at heart, VineStove’s general essence is similar to that of Amazon Mechanical Turk, ShortTask, or Fiverr. People post jobs or tasks for others to carry out, and pay them a small amount for doing so. These are tasks that can typically be completed in the ballpark of five minutes; example tasks on VineStove’s homepage include photoshopping an image or researching payment plans.

The thing that sets VineStove apart from those sites, however, is the fact that all the work is done on a strictly volunteer basis. Payment is still rendered, but instead of going to the person doing the work, it’s donated to a charity or nonprofit organization of the worker’s choice. And according to Armstrong, the companies are “doing some pretty cool things. I just added the SENS Foundation, for example; they work on longevity research. Channeling money to them means we all get to live a little longer!”

Casey’s Gift To The World

There’s another layer to Armstrong’s world-saving scheme. In addition to providing labor and funding for these foundations, he intends to eventually make VineStove open-source, allowing anyone with adequate interest to have access to the entirety of code he uses to run his site.

“The end game for me is really the open-source project,” Armstrong affirms. “I want to see microtasking get big and mature faster. I am addicted to sites like mTurk and Quora,  and microvolunteering sites like Sparked; I want microtasking to become a part of everything, really.”

He sees the open-source release of VineStove to be an important step in the process. “It might seem like a gutsy move, but I firmly believe that a crowdsourcing platform is about what you put into it, and not its clever construction or web development. I had struggled to build a microtasking site for years. It took me a lot of effort to learn web development, research my options, and plan it all out… I wish VineStove could have gone up in three clicks years ago.”

By releasing VineStove’s source code to the public, Armstrong’s intention is that anyone with a reasonable amount of dedication will be able to build a platform to serve their purposes, with minimal technical knowledge required. Like a true altruist, he hopes to render the hardships that he himself encountered in building his platform obsolete.

Right, But What’s This About Turning Folks Into Robots?

Getting a site ready to go open-source isn’t an easy task. It takes money, and for a small team like Armstrong’s, a certain amount of extra hands. And oddly enough, the solution to those problems can be found in the form of a crowdfunded robotic intern.

I discussed crowdfunding a little bit last week; it’s the process of soliciting funding for a project from good-hearted denizens of the Internet instead of trying to get a big corporation or fatcat to bankroll the whole thing. Armstrong’s current project on RocketHub intends to do just that, providing the capital to make VineStove open-source through donations by people like you and me.

The robotic intern is the reward. Donate at least $5, and you’ll earn the ability to join Armstrong in his team on the project by piloting the robot as a proxy. You’ll be able to freely move around the VineStove office, interact with the staff, help out with the website, or even just drive the thing into Casey’s foot for half an hour (if that’s your thing).

While the ability for VineStove to get a different intern with a different skill set each day is one that will undoubtedly add some flexibility to Armstrong’s team, he also states that the project has an aspect of novelty as well. “The robot idea is mostly just fun. I don’t know where it will lead. However, I’m a believer in the internet spilling out into the real world, and I think we’re going to see more internet controlled robots in the future,” Armstrong says. He went on to reference similar projects in the past, particularly one in which mTurk allowed people to remotely control a robotic arm to perform common household tasks.

Become a Member of Team Armstrong

If any bit of this sounds appealing to you, know that there is more than ample opportunity for you to join in and help Casey save the world. With a little more than two weeks left in the funding campaign, there’s plenty of time to donate and help bring microtasking to the masses. If you’ve got a unique set of skills, you can put them to work by signing up to be one of the robotic interns, or just using VineStove itself to do some good-old charity work; all you need is a Facebook registration.

Whether you want to live forever, build your own thriving online community, or just mess around with a robot for a few hours, Casey Armstrong has you covered, and the world is better off because of it.