"Let's say I'm a comic book artist, as an example, or a photographer," says Williams, "and I'd like people to go and have a look at my Web site or my brand new piece of art. I get onto the site and create a mission and if I've got 5,000 shareholders, as an example, on the stock exchange, I send the mission to the shareholders and I select how many people can complete the mission and how many eaves I want to reward people."

The prospect of a big company like Intel paying its employees to play games may sound odd, but it happens every day and it's seen as a profitable way to promote the company's brand. Whether a social platform is designed as a game isn't terribly important: its global popularity is.

"As a technology brand, we touch so many different pieces of the tech ecosystem. Whether it's the cloud, to your laptop, to your phone -- we're there," says Bryan Rhoads, media and analytics strategist at Intel Corp.'s social media centre of excellence. "We believe these games and other environments to be places where our customers are. And they're using our technology, so we should be there, too."