In many games today
It's our job as the player to gather our gear, throw on a brave face, and challenge the forces of evil threatening the game's world
But instead of battling the icon of sin in Doom Eternal or Animal Crossing's eternal capitalists Tom Nook, whom I'm totally gonna pay back soon... Promise!
What if there were some real-life evils that we could help defeat while we played?
Well, it turns out there are. So today, we wanted to showcase some opportunities for gamers to make a difference in just that way
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Before we begin our exploration of games that can do real world good
It's important to mention an idea called citizen or crowd-sourced science.
That's when research is conducted entirely by or with significant contributions by
non-professional scientists. And one of the most famous examples of this is SETI at home
even though it wasn't a game the project allowed the general public to contribute to the search for intelligent life beyond our earth simply by
running its software on home computers connected to the World Wide Web. SETI at home went live on May 17
1999 and has been running for 21 years only recently ending distribution of new work to users to concentrate on processing the data
they've compiled after all that time, and while intelligent interstellar life has yet to be discovered the project itself
inspired the imaginations of over 5 million users.
Which brings us to the rise of citizen science games.
One great example is Play to Cure: Genes In Space, a game from Cancer Research UK
released in 2014. The game allowed players to help scientists looking for cancer-causing genes
hiding in gigabytes of data and that data was preserved as spots on slides called microarrays
where each spot contained a gene or a known DNA sequence, however
computers were taking too long to analyze it and it turns out the human eye is faster.
Ok.
But how did they get thousands of non-scientists gamers to track the peaks and valleys of a microarray?
By dodging asteroids in a roguelike shooter set in outer space. For real! W hen players mapped a course in the game for their spaceship
they were actually scanning microarray data for faults better the telltale signs of cancer and
after the success of Genes In Space. Cancer Research UK went on to several more games to analyze breast, bladder, and lung cancer
samples. And there are quite a few other games continuing this citizen science endeavor, including Eyewire. Where
250,000 players become heroes of neuroscience and solve 3D puzzles to map neuron branches and complete reconstruction of cells and
ultimately entire circuits of the brain.
PHYLO, that's helping to decipher our DNA and identify new genes. And
then there's Eterna, which is a game that allows its top players to create their own
RNA designs that are brought to life at Stanford University's School of Medicine, you know
I think I've seen this movie.
In fact, medicine is an especially promising area for games and game developers.
And game designer Jane McGonigal found this out up close and personal. In
2009, she was diagnosed with a concussion so severe the pain persisted for weeks and left her feeling suicidal.
So she designed a game originally titled Jane The Concussion Slayer, while it didn't stop the pain
It did help relieve some of her anxiety and depression about her condition and the game itself draws from cognitive
behavioral therapy as the players battle mobs. And then in 2012, the game was redesigned as a phone app under the new moniker SuperBetter
McGonagall had a very personal reason for designing her game.
But she's just one of many examples of a growing movement to make games that do more than simply teach a subject.
Rather to make games that directly develop their players powers.
For instance, a
Company called Level X is helping doctors level up at a variety of skills through training their muscle memory in complex tasks of their field.
It's kind of like in Super Smash Brothers. Where the more you practice the better
you'll get at the required movement and timing and though they're naming conventions aren't exactly
awe inspiring with titles like GASTRO EX, AIRWAY EX, and you get the idea, but their hearts definitely in the right place
Even if that place is called CARDIO EX.
Another approach in assisting a different side of medical training can be found in a title called Night-Shift from Shell Games
It's a story-driven adventure game with characters players will care about
Specifically aimed at helping train ER doctors to reduce errors. Game players are also benefiting in other ways
Thanks to some high-tech wizardry
The mixed reality game Sky Fare was designed in
2017, at USC by a big team led by Mari and Tina goat sees with Christina Leland as the manager for its usability study
Sky Ferrer helps keep wheelchair-bound patients with spinal cord injuries on track with their physical therapy by turning normal boring repetitive
exercises into fun adventures like canoeing down a virtual river. And a new team of students are currently working on a quite timely version for
Everyone locked up at home during the pandemic.
We also can't count out the good that some commercial games have brought into the world when adapted to address real-life
Situations the game Super Monkey Ball, with its twisting turning gameplay, is cited as dramatically improving doctors
Laparoscopic techniques and then there's good old Minecraft back in 2012
again
The United Nations began a program called Block-by-Block
That used minecraft to get residents involved with the planning of their public spaces to best suit them
funded by the sales of Microsoft merchandise
It's continued to provide local
Populations with Minecraft to help with similar projects all over the world. Block by Block is currently being used in 35 countries
Everywhere from Curt deport Kathmandu to Lakai Haiti to help work through a myriad of community design problems such as in
2017, in Hanoi, Vietnam when young girls used Minecraft to identify badly lit areas where walking was dangerous
but let's end today with
possibly the most famous of the citizen science games to date
Fold-It
the objective of the game is to fold the structures of selected proteins the highest scoring attempts of which are
Analyzed by medical experts and used to attack real diseases. A 2010 paper in the scientific journal Nature
Credited Fold-It's then
57,000 players with results that outperformed algorithmically calculated solutions and their most famous success was in
2011 when their gamers helped unlock the structure of an AIDS-related enzyme a problem that had stumped scientists for a decade that the Fold-It players
accomplished in three weeks. As you
Can see there are quite a few games out there, designed to do some real good in the real world
But our planet is in no short supply of Evil's to fight so during this time of social distancing and self isolating
Maybe try your hand at some of these crowd-sourced science games.
We'll leave a list of the ones we talked about in this episode in the description below and if you're looking for a
crowd-sourced science game to help out with our most recent health crisis. Fold-it is a great place to start, as their
240,000 users are still folding away, many of focus on COVID-19.
Remember our favorite pastime isn't just fun and games. Sometimes the games we play can be fun and do some real good
See you next week everyone
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