Crowdsourcing

I recently read an artical for class entitled "Collective Intelligence vs the Wisdom of Crowds" by Henry Jenkins about crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing suggests that a group will always be smarter than the individual, as all individuals will bring different experiences and wisdom that as a collective will always make them smarter than the individual. It was proposed by Henry Jenkins that perhaps video games can be designed to make use of the collective wisdom of groups and used as a way to solve real world problems. The article proposed that the game Sim City could be used for city planning and policy writing and could potentially offer solutions based on the ideas of average game players that would be better than those proposed by professional city planners and policy writers. Though it can be argued that a game cannot ever truly represent the world and, therefore, how would we know that policies that would work in the game would work in real life? Despite this a game that could gather this information would in the least offer market research that could be useful in the design of real world solutions.