Hi,
From my experience, gamification can encourage users to take action, such as buying things or doing tasks for free. It feels much more rewarding when you receive a “prize” for your actions, even if that prize is not material.
I was thinking - what if there was a game where players could buy items for real money, and that money went directly to open-source projects? Or maybe players could provide proof of their support for an open-source project and receive rewards for it. Alternatively, for every merged pull request into an open-source project, a player could receive a unique in-game item that cannot be obtained otherwise.
I imagine an MMORPG where you can flex your gear or character to other players, multiplying the satisfaction, while simultaneously doing a genuinely good thing by supporting open source.
What do you think? Is it a stupid idea or not?
I think it’s a good idea but implementing it well would take massive amounts of effort. That kind of project management is a beast in and of itself.
A big hurdle I see is how do you handle quality vs quantity? Who will be selecting the projects in order to stop someone creating twenty “open-source” projects and spamming merges they accept themself?
If you’re going off financial donations to projects you need to make sure of the same thing. You’ll need to balance rewards for total amount contributed vs time (like consistently for a year vs all in one month). You’ll need to keep in mind that some will give everything they can and won’t want to feel left in the dust just because someone else could drop daddy’s credit card. Even though getting contributions is the goal you’ll want it to feel rewarding at every level of contribution.
If you’re going for in game items you’d need to make the game actually a solid and unique game otherwise someone will just use AI, rip it off, and spin up competitors and the whole thing will fizzle as everyone in all the little spinoffs won’t feel a community. It’s the kind of thing where concentration of users will be major.
And that’s without even thinking about advertising the project or actually developing it. Just the rewards.