Gaming for science

How to advance science from the comfort of your couch

How many evenings have you spend in front of the computer chasing monsters and cracking puzzles? Let me guess, the answer is “many”. Statistics indicate that about 2.6 billion people all over the world are active computer gamers (1). This crazy number makes video gaming one of the most popular hobbies worldwide and is fuelling the global market for a gaming industry that is projected to reach $159 billion by the end of this year (2).

If your grandmother gets upset every time she catches you fighting goblins in the virtual world, there is now a good excuse to bring up in your defence. Several online multiplayer games were designed by scientists from different fields in order to get some help from the world gaming community in solving hard-to-crack academic puzzles. These games are examples of citizen science projects, where anyone can help to carry out cutting-edge research. So tell your grandmother that you do not just waste your time on video gaming anymore, now you help to advance research from the comfort of your couch (and make her proud!). How does it work?

These days science has become a data-intense endeavour. Researchers from all over the world work day and night collecting information about different topics. What happens within a cell once it gets infected with viruses? How many galaxies are there in the Milky Way? How do our brains work? These and many more questions are nearly impossible to answer without analysing terabytes of data.

Although computers continue to get better year after year and can process myriads of observations, there are still some tasks where they lose to people. Humans are winning the competition with machines when solving complex problems which require intuition. That is the reason, why many scientific problems can be solved only by combining the power of human creativity and computational capacity. Unfortunately, there are many more exciting data hiding the answers to the mysteries of nature, than there are scientists in the world. That is exactly the moment when you join the game!

Although working on many scientific problems requires years of specialised training and education, some of the tasks can be hidden inside of the usual computer puzzles. Citizens science games present complex scientific tasks and questions in the form of simple spatial games. The scientists get your intellectual input on solving protein structures or classifying galaxies, while you enjoy your gaming night.

One of the pioneers in popular online games from citizen science projects is Galaxy Zoo (3). In 2008 researchers created a multiplayer online game where everyone can help to classify new galaxies and get a feeling of what it takes to be an astronomer! The zooniverse.org website greets you with the words “Few have witnessed what you’re about see”. Once you start the game, you will see an image of some distant galaxy. Your task is then to find the shape, which most accurately describes it. This way players help scientists with a complex task essential for understanding of the evolution of galaxies. Galaxy Zoo has been running for over a decade and continues to contribute to a better understanding of the evolution of the universe. In fact, at the time of writing people-powered research has led to 66 published research articles based on analysis carried out by gamers with Galaxy Zoo (4).

Biology, too, took advantage of the public’s brains as a valuable resource. The same year as Galaxy Zoo was launched, a team of biologists started Foldit, a computer game which uses a 3D puzzle to predict protein structures (5). You don’t need to hold a PhD in biochemistry to score high in this game — the basic principles of protein folding and molecular interactions are encoded in it. Therefore, you are free to follow your imagination in solving a complex protein structure or, even, designing a new one.

The statistics behind Foldit illustrate the power of citizens science projects. The gamers solved a protein structure of an HIV enzyme, which had puzzled scientists for nearly a decade, in under 3 weeks (6). In the ongoing COVID-19 crisis gamers have been trying to identify or design proteins that bind SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (7). These efforts might help to understand better the biology of the virus and pinpoint the prospective avenue for therapeutic approaches, which we desperately need in the ongoing pandemic.

In fact, Foldit allows gamers not only to solve the molecular puzzles, but to design new proteins as well. Last year the results of creating new protein structures by players were published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals — Nature (8). To test these protein structures researchers even synthesised 146 game-designed proteins and investigated their properties. These impressive results emphasise the huge potential that comes about when the power of computers and the spirit of human creativity are combined.

Of course, Galaxy Zoo and Foldit are not the only ways that someone can contribute to scientific research. If you are not a big fan of classifying galaxies or folding proteins, you can find something more suited to your taste at SciStarter (9). This website lists more than 3,000 global citizen science projects with different challenges, ranging from the identification of insects to bird-watching. Gaming for science or taking pictures of butterflies in your garden helps researchers to advance science and make million people familiar with complex scientific problems. So if it’s three o’clock in the afternoon and your grandkids are still in pyjamas, opening another pack of chips in front of a computer monitor, don’t judge them: they might be helping to change the world!

References:

1. https://financesonline.com/number-of-gamers-worldwide/
2. https://www.reuters.com/article/esports-business-gaming-revenues-idUSFLM8jkJMl
3. Lintott CJ et al. Galaxy Zoo: morphologies derived from visual inspection of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 389, 1179–1189 (2008).
4. https://www.zooniverse.org/about/publications
5. https://fold.it
6. Khatib, F., DiMaio, F., Cooper, S. et al. Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players. Nat Struct Mol Biol 18, 1175–1177 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nsmb.2119
7. https://foldit.fandom.com/wiki/COVID-19
8. Koepnick B., Flatten J., Husain T., Ford A., Silva D. A., Bick M. J., Bauer A., Liu G., Ishida Y., Boykov A., Estep R. D., Kleinfelter S., Norgard-Solano T., Wei L., Players F., Montelione G. T., DiMaio F., Popovic Z., Khatib F., Cooper S., and Baker D., “ De novo protein design by citizen scientists,” Nature 570, 390–394 (2019).10.1038/s41586–019–1274–4
9. https://scistarter.org