Format: Web

Thanks, NASA. In return for just a handful of the brainier Nazis and an ever-diminishing chunk of the federal budget, you’ve given us non-stick frying pans, memory foam, and those funny pens that can write underwater, which they used to sell in the Innovations catalogue.

Cheap shots about Werner von Braun aside, it’s hard not to be swept along in everything the US government’s most romantic outfit gets involved with, and the modern age, while it lacks the really big ticket missions, at least offers an unprecedented sense of vicarious involvement to the terminally Earthbound space fan, whether you’re following astronauts on Twitter or taking virtual tours of space hardware. Now we get to give something back: even if you aren’t a decorated pilot and maths genius like I am, NASA wants you, too!

And it’s to do with the red planet. Mars has always been a special, rather fraught location for the space agency, home to some of its darkest, most idiotic disasters - such as the Climate Orbiter which went expensively awry following a confusion over metric and imperial measurements during the planning and implementation stage – but also the scene of its greatest successes, like the soil-grabbing Viking robots and, of course, Spirit and Opportunity. (On top of capturing the imagination of childless thirty-year-olds everywhere, the Mars Rovers are also the greatest piece of hardware naming ever, Opportunity finding easy wins around every corner, while Spirit, currently trapped in loose sand, has fought valiantly for every success).

Mars, then is where NASA jumps in with both feet, in other words, and the results are either an expensive downer sitcom or something that makes your heart skip a beat and your eyes turn to the skies with a new-found excitement.

So where do we come in? Simple: NASA has already taken rather a lot of pictures of our planetary neighbour by this point, and now it needs someone to sift through them. To do this, it’s created the crowd-sourcing website Be A Martian, which turns the grunt work into a game. (Advance warning: in a decision probably made by those Metric/Imperial guys, it relies on users having Microsoft Searchlight installed.)

Actually, it turns the grunt work into two games: one about counting craters in photos, and another in which players must match close-up snaps of the planet’s surface with wider shots, presumably to make it easier for Starbucks to spot prime shopping districts when we all move in – even though Chris Dahlen has already pointed out that there’s practically no point in going, since we’ll never get a decent game of Quake Live running while we’re up there.

These are games in the very loosest sense, then, but there’s a points-based reward system to tempt you into matching photographs as long as possible, which means NASA has at least rumbled the peculiar pleasures of the grind. Perhaps the most interesting part of the entire project is that we’re now so blasé about the local districts of the universe that NASA feels it needs to bribe us with levelling-up to sift through, y’know, pictures of an alien planet. Perhaps that’s what the stateless future of the cloud is going to be like: a place where work becomes a crowd-sourcing MMORPG in which every little activity has its own virtual price. On earth or in space, then, the future of toil might be World Of WarCraft whether you’re in the office, or back home wasting a few minutes before dinner. Either way, be sure to check out Be A Martian - and get your eyes to Mars.

For more on NASA's increasingly loving relationship with videogames, read our article about its MMOG, Astronaut, here.