Mike Tyson's Punch House

 

We already covered gamification once, but we recently came across another example that is too good to ignore.  A few weeks ago at the Cleanweb Hackathon in Boston 16 teams of programmers spent the weekend creating applications that attempt to monitor and increase the efficiency of energy usage.  The winning application was a game called Michael Tyson’s Punch House, and if that name doesn’t sound familiar (and awesome) to you, then your parents didn’t love you.

To play, you upload your daily Green Button data (more on that in a minute) to the site and your house is randomly matched up with another of similar size.  Your energy usage data scrolls across the bottom of the screen as the two houses duke it out.  In the end, the house with the lowest cumulative energy usage during the day scores a K.O., while the loser can try to use less energy tomorrow and return for a rematch.  We think it would be even more fun in real-time but that doesn’t seem practical.

Green Button is a data standard that allows consumers to download and view their utilities consumption data in a simple, easy to understand format.  A list of participating utility companies can be found here.  In addition to punch house, green button data should allow developers to create a range of different applications aimed at energy efficiency and awareness.