Borderlands Gamers Fuel Next-Generation Citizen Science

rainy April 2020, more More than 2 billion people Some form of lockdown has been implemented to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2.^One With restaurants, sports stadiums, and concert venues closed, people are increasingly turning to activities they can do at home: tending to sourdough starters, growing houseplants, and playing video games.There are many, many Of video games.²

In the same month, new features appeared in popular games. Borderlands 3: An arcade booth neatly tucked away in a corner of Sanctuary III, the spaceship that players use to travel the galaxy. In the arcade game within the game, players solve simple puzzles by aligning sequences of colored tiles, somewhat reminiscent of the following setting: Candy Crush. But the minigame’s seemingly simple appearance is deceiving. It’s the result of years of collaboration between game designers and scientists, and has become one of the most successful citizen scientist projects ever created.

In a paper published in Nature BiotechnologyThe team analyzed data from millions of players. Borderlands Science project.^three Their efforts have helped scientists assess the evolutionary relationships between bacterial species in massive datasets of the human gut microbiome, which will inform future exploration of the role of these microbes in health and disease.

“I think it’s a great approach,” he said. Amy SterlingNot related Borderlands Science Project. Sterling is a veteran in the crowdsourcing science field. She has served as Executive Director of: EyewireA citizen science game that maps neural circuits, it has been running for a long time since 2012.⁴ “We know that games have a number of effects on humans, some good and some bad. But when we apply citizen science to games, Borderlands—There probably won’t be any downsides. It’s a win-win for everyone.”

Like many scientific endeavors, this one began with a problem. Jerome Valdisfull“A fundamental problem we face in biology is the multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem. Basically, it’s the process of comparing DNA sequences from different organisms to better understand their phylogeny and how they are related to each other,” said McGill University computational biologist and co-author of the study.

Waldispühl said that while MSA computer programs have improved over the past few decades, they still require human supervision. As organisms diverge, DNA changes in different and unpredictable ways. Nucleotides can be inserted, deleted, or replaced with different types of nucleotides, and there are not necessarily hard and fast rules that a computer can follow to figure out how to match the mutated sequence. But the inexplicable black box of the human mind can often intuit the optimal alignment and correct the computer’s mistakes.

“There are really no real rules for this,” Waldispühl said. “It’s often about looking at the context in which patterns, mutations, or insertions or deletions occur. It’s about the aesthetics of alignment.” While human curation of these datasets is critical, it’s also incredibly time-consuming, creating a huge bottleneck in the research pipeline.

“We had to figure out how to integrate the human mind into large-scale computing processes,” Waldispühl said.

In 2010, Waldispühl and his research team launched Phylo, a crowdsourced, lightly gamified online program that allowed anyone to contribute to MSA curation. Phylo met with modest success, with almost 36,000 Number of registered users in the first five years.⁵

“But we soon realized that even though we were one of the most successful citizen science projects in the world, the scale and the amount of participation was simply not enough to solve the types of problems we were interested in,” he said.

Baldisfull wasn’t the only one considering the issue of citizen science participation. In 2014, computer scientist and study co-author Attila Shantner They co-founded a company called Massively Multiplayer Online Science with the goal of bringing crowdsourced science to video games. Two years later, Waldispühl and Szantner teamed up and, along with Gearbox Entertainment, BorderlandsThe long process of designing began. Borderlands Science project.

The team wanted to solve the MSA problem, but they still needed to find a dataset large enough to analyze. Luckily, researchers at the University of California, San Diego Microtheta Initiativea microbiome sequencing study conducted using “donations” from thousands of volunteers, were willing to share their data. The resulting dataset contains about a million 16S ribosomal RNA sequences, which serve as rough taxonomic markers for different bacterial species.

Daniel McDonaldThe initiative’s scientific director and a co-author of the study says that constructing the phylogeny of these diverse populations is more than just a quixotic curiosity. “Once we can infer the phylogeny, we can use that relationship information to help us understand how diverse our microbial community samples are. For example, is your microbial community more diverse than mine? And we can look at that in the context of the evolution that’s been expressed.”

Researchers can also perform these assessments across all samples, which can yield valuable insights. “We found that using phylogenetics in the microbiome space was much more informative and powerful in separating subtle differences between humans, which can ultimately be linked to things like health, lifestyle, and diet,” McDonald said.

Borderlands Science It was released on April 7, 2020. The team considered a delay as the world’s attention seemed to be focused elsewhere as COVID-19 cases surged around the world. million And it kept going up. But right after launch, they realized that this project was going to be a huge success.

“The day we launched this feature, Borderlands 3We collected five times more data than Jérôme did in the ten years he was running the business. [Phylo]”It’s some kind of crazy power and resourcefulness,” Szantner said. Athletes contribute to scientific research.”

The team walked a fine line between making a fun and engaging game while also making sure that players’ contributions were still scientifically relevant. Ultimately, they succeeded in both. Players were very engaged with the game. Since its launch, more than 4 million people have participated in the initiative, solving more than 135 million RNA mini-puzzles.^three Their participation also contributed to scientific understanding and curation of MSA algorithm output. Borderlands Science Players improved the phylogenetic tree structure compared to when the MSA algorithm was used alone.

“There are many reasons why we want to involve the crowd in scientific research,” he said. Marian Poets“One of them is to use volume to improve efficiency. In this case, it’s impressive. Millions of people have done something that would take researchers thousands of years to do,” says a researcher at Copenhagen Business School who was not involved in the project.

Sterling is also impressed by the scale of the project and hopes other video game makers will follow suit. “I can imagine a future where these huge game studios are launching new citizen science projects every year to prove to the world that games can give back to society, and that’s just part of their corporate social responsibility,” she said.

But Poetz said citizen science projects can have other goals that aren’t necessarily related to data. These include improving scientific literacy, changing attitudes toward science, and democratizing the scientific process. Incorporating citizen science projects into video games would not only greatly expand the reach of the projects, but also 3 billion people Video games are enjoyed in some form or another all over the world, which has led to a growing diversity of players.⁶

“I think that’s what’s special about this,” Poetz said. “There’s data that shows that certain types of people contribute to crowd science projects. They’re more likely to be white, more educated, etc. By including this specific project in a video game, we can reach people who wouldn’t normally go to Zooniverse or other crowd science platforms.”

Poets said the project was successful in reaching a lot of people who aren’t interested in science, but he would have been interested to know whether the team pursued specific non-scientific goals, what approaches they used to pursue those goals, and what metrics they used to determine the outcome of those efforts.

Baldisful says the non-scientific implications of the project weren’t initially the primary focus, but he found them to be important and valuable. “I approached this as a computational problem. I wanted to make computers smarter than they are now,” he said. “But ultimately, what I found fascinating was the feedback from players.”

“A lot of people get turned off from science because of societal pressure or people telling them they’re not smart enough. This game allows you to see a lot of people actually engaging in the scientific process, and through that they realize they can do things they never thought they could do, and they realize that science is fun,” Waldispühl continued.

“We’re trying to instill in society a sense that science is good,” he said. “Ultimately, we want to inspire people, fight misinformation, and strengthen public trust in science. I think that’s a real game changer, beyond the scientific results themselves.”

references

1. Go Di COVID-19 lockdowns are ongoing worldwide. Occup Med. 2020;70(5):322.
2. DeFrancisco-Donohue J et al. Gaming in the Time of Pandemic: An International Survey Assessing the Impact of COVID-19 Lockdowns on the Health of Young Video Gamers. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023;20(19):6855.
3. Sarajin-Gendron R and others Using citizen science to improve microbial systematics in mass-market video games. Nat Biotechnology. 38622344.
4. Kim JS et al. Spatiotemporal wiring specificity underlies retinal direction selectivity. nature2014;509(7500):331-336.
5. Sing A et al. Lessons from a large-scale online genome computer game. AAAI HCOMP Procedure. 2017;5:177-186.
6. Morikawa Y. The gaming industry is experiencing a huge surge in popularity.. GlobalEDGE, Michigan State University. https://globaledge.msu.edu/blog/post/57295/the-gaming-industry-sees-a-staggering-surge-in-popularity