Ask HN: Could a game trick users into doing work?

In short, yes. I'm not sure how sustainable the platform is long term, but you can earn money in the short term.

Yes this is called Games with a Purpose. It is Luis Von Ahn thesis. Luis created:

recaptcha, to help digitilize books by harnessing millions of captchas.

The ESP game to help tag images for search purposes.

Both sold to Google

And later founded Duolingo, to democratize language learning.

His Ted talk is a good starting point.

The call center industry is going towards “gamification”. So the agents get metrics for doing well.

I would like to hear more about this.