How Scientists Are Using

Games to Unlock the Bodys

Mysteries
Theyre not just for kids anymore
Maybe it was the late hour. Or maybe I was just hungry. But as I stared at my tablet, the mass of
neurons looked like nothing so much as leftover spaghetti stuffed into a Tupperware container.
My task was to trace one single strand as it wended its way through a space packed solid with
them, ducking behind other strands and reappearing where youd least expect it. As I picked out
the pieces that belonged to my neuron, points racked up. The goal? To help scientists solve a
puzzle that has proved maddeningly tricky: to understand how the retina is wired, how the eye sees
all it does.
I was playing EyeWire, an online scientific discovery game. But its not some slick exercise in
infotainmentits real research. A growing community of scientists and engineers is borrowing the
elements that make video or computer games so addictiverewards, points, leaderboards and
online collaborationto enlist thousands of players to solve legitimate scientific mysteries. This
approach has the potential to be the future of scientific discovery, says computer engineer Seth
Cooper of the University of Washington, a pioneer in the field and co-creator of Foldit, a game
designed to better understand proteins.
This playful approach to doing science is part of a larger trend, what has become known as the
gamification of life. According to its advocatesthe best known being Jane McGonigal, game
designer and author of the 2011 book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How
They Can Change the Worldgames can effectively address social and even personal challenges,
from crafting better immigration policy to encouraging safe sex to strengthening emotional
resilience.
Though gamification has been hailed as the new new thing, the range of its reach is not yet clear.
McGonigals game Superbetter, intended to help users recover from illness and injury, is in clinical
trials. And let others debate whether playing the Migrant Trail deepens ones compassion for
undocumented immigrants enough to spur public policy changes.
Scientific discovery games, though, are already proving themselves. Take Foldit. This online game
asks you to determine the 3-D shape of a protein, knowledge crucial to understanding how it
works. Entire armies of biochemists and computers have failed to find a straightforward recipe for
folding any sequence of amino acids into a protein. So there I sat at my computer one rainy
Sunday, dragging models of amino acids with my mouse and clicking commands such as wiggle
and shake with the determination of a gamer rescuing an imaginary princess.
Big pharma probably shouldnt hire me as a protein chemist, but other Foldit players (there are
some 350,000) have determined the structure of a monkey virus protease, an enzyme that plays a
key role in the simian equivalent of AIDS and that may lead to new drugs for humans. They did it
in a few weeks, earning author credits on a 2011 paper in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
The protein, Cooper says, had stumped biochemists for a decade.
In a game called EteRNA, I moved around the building blocks of RNA to create molecules that
nature never thought of and was rewarded with graphics of trophies and light beams. In
Nanocrafter, I attached strands of DNA like Legos into molecules seemingly able to walk, at least
as judged by the software. If such hypothetical compounds were synthesized in a lab and were
capable of crawling through the body, they might, for example, deliver drugs right where theyre
needed, Cooper says.
Of the games I tried, the most purely spatial was EyeWire, created by MIT neuroscientist Sebastian
Seung. EyeWirers have mapped more than 100 neurons in the mouse retina, and 2,183 of the
gamers contributed to a Nature paper in May explaining how neurons track direction of movement
across the visual field.
Despite the games reliance on computer power, EyeWire has been successful for a different
reasonbrainpower. It taps our powers of pattern recognition, spatial processing, insight and
creativity. The same is true for the other scientific discovery games I played. Turns out people are
good at sensing when a molecule on the surface of a protein model actually belongs inside it, and
well happily disassemble and rebuild the protein, making a structure worse before we make it
better.
Its this tinkering approach, this trial and error, that is the basis of play. Beginning when we could
hold a rattle, we all learned to solve problems by playing with them. Only now we can all play and
contribute to science, too.