New minigames coming to video games in 2020 borderlands 3located in the resident scientist's laboratory on the spacecraft Sanctuary III. Arcade games may seem like just an in-game way to kill time, but tile matching puzzle games—borderlands science— Millions of players can now help map the human gut microbiome.
borderlands science This is one of the first examples of a citizen science game being incorporated into a mainstream video game. Converts a player's tile matching into a sequence alignment of the microorganism's DNA strand, which encodes ribosomal RNA. Ultimately, this will help estimate the genetic relationships between different gut microbes. This is important information for unraveling the complex interactions between diet, disease, and the microbiome.
Played by over 4 million gamers since launch borderlands science, have solved more than 100 million puzzles in total, making this one of the largest citizen science projects in history. An analysis of the project published in Nature Biotechnology found that not only did the game generate significant player engagement, but the results outperformed state-of-the-art computational methods.
“We didn't know if players of popular games liked the game or not. borderlands 3 Are you interested, or are the results sufficient to improve what is already known about microbial evolution? But we were surprised by the results,” Jerome Waldispuer, a professor at McGill University and lead author of the paper, said in a statement.
Return to the beginning
Citizen science games often closely resemble real scientific tasks being performed and involve finding solutions to complex problems, such as optimizing protein folding. foldit. This has the potential to yield very useful results, but its complexity may be off-putting, reduce player engagement and retention, and potentially limit the audience to those with a pre-existing interest in science. there is.
borderlands science seeks to overcome these challenges by taking a new design approach to break down the overall scientific problem into many bite-sized puzzles. This is not as easy as it sounds, since there is no “truth” in RNA sequence alignments, so it is impossible to simply rate a solution to a puzzle as right or wrong. Instead, each puzzle contributes a small amount to the overall optimization of the sequence solution.
This simplification, or gamification, means that users are more likely to engage with the task, but it is still useful even if the player completes only a few puzzles. Compare this to Foldit. In Foldit, if a player gives up after tinkering with a protein's structure for 10 minutes, he gets nothing.
The success in modularizing the problem was one of the key innovations of this research, said Sebastian Deterding. Sebastian Deterding spoke to Ars, a professor at Imperial College London whose research includes citizen science games. “If you get enough eyeballs in the beginning, even if it's just to keep a person around for two or three puzzles, that's enough.”
Additionally, developers always keep game design front and center, aiming to create games that are inherently simply fun to play. Gearbox Games, developer of the best-selling Borderlands series, carefully designed the minigames to fit seamlessly into the series' unique art and atmosphere, including interactions with existing characters to maintain immersion. Did.
risk that paid off
Designing a citizen science game is a balancing act between making the task simple and fun enough to engage users, yet complex enough to produce meaningful results. The simpler the task, the more people need to be involved to generate the data.for borderlands science, the hypergamification gamble paid off. Although this task was more gamified than previous citizen science games, it generated high player participation that more than made up for this simplification.
This game dramatically outperforms its predecessor. PhiloThis is a free-to-play, standalone game with a non-gaming interface. borderlands science Our players collected more than five times as much microbial DNA sequences as our previous game, Phylo, collected over 10 years,” Waldispühl said in a statement.
nevertheless borderlands science has generated some good data and shown that integrating science into mainstream games works well, but Deterding is skeptical that other teams will be able to adopt this approach. is.
“Sharing data with industry is very difficult and highly dependent on just how lucky you are to get a connection,” he told Ars. “It would be interesting if we could convince entertainment gaming companies that this is a great corporate social responsibility initiative that more companies can and should do and easily do. But again, , I think it's a very fragile and unstable path at this point.”
Nature Biotechnology, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41587-024-02175-6
Ivan Paul is a freelance writer based in the UK. He recently completed his PhD in cancer research. He is on his Twitter @ivan_paul_.
