Beyond Gamification: Implications of Purposeful Games for the Information Systems Discipline

In late 2011, players of a multiplayer online puzzle game, Foldit, were delighted to discover that they had not only won the game, but that their epic performance had solved “the crystal structure of M-PMV retroviral protease” by generating “models of sufficient quality for successful molecular replacement and subsequent structure determination” providing “new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs” (Khatib et al. 2011, p. 1).