EVE Online recently launched Phase 4 of its citizen science initiative, Project Discovery, which engages players with data and research. So far, players have contributed hundreds of years of research data to the project, with previous phases involving COVID-19 research. The current phase is allowing gamers to fight cancer, or more specifically, contribute to cancer research.
Project Discovery’s four phases have included research into proteins in human cells, exoplanet discovery, COVID-19 research, and now cancer research. Players who log into Project Discovery are given data to analyze in the form of minigames that reward them with in-game currency and items. As the researchers point out, the data is meant to be processed by the human brain. Gamers are not doing the work of machines.
GamesBeat spoke to several people involved in the inception and launch of Project Discovery in-game, including Attila Szantner, CEO of Massively Multiplayer Online Science, who was credited with the original idea from others. “What we’ve proven, or what you can clearly see in Project Discovery, is that players are solving engagement problems in citizen science and providing researchers with a massive, high-quality dataset,” he said. “But it’s also important to recognize that citizen science is an incredible tool for talking about science.”
EVE Online’s creative director, Bergur Finnbogason, also said, “We set up incentives, in-game rewards, in-game narratives for players to follow. After a few months, we realized that while there are a lot of players who play just for the rewards, there are also a lot of people who play for the pride of being involved and doing something and giving back… There were a lot of discussions outside of product discovery where people were actually arguing about data points. And these are not scientists. These are just people who have a general interest in what we’re doing.”
Join GamesBeat Next!
GamesBeat Next connects the next generation of video game leaders. Join us in San Francisco on October 28th and 29th! Take advantage of the Buy 1 Get 1 Free Pass offer. Sale ends this Friday, August 16th. Register to participate. here.
So how exactly are gamers helping?
Dr. Ryan Brinkman, a distinguished scientist with the BC Cancer Institute and the University of British Columbia, told GamesBeat a bit more about what players will be doing when they take part in Project Discovery’s minigame. “The last two levels, you’re looking at flow cytometry data. Anything to do with the immune system, flow cytometry is a technique for looking at that. What players are looking for are these different cell types in the blood.”
According to Dr. Brinkman, the X-factor that gamers contribute is in the numbers. “The question that everyone’s wondering is, can gamers do what scientists do? We sat down with scientists to play the games that players play every day, and we asked them to analyze the data as much as they could. Then we compared the scientists to hundreds of gamers analyzing the same plots. What we can do here is leverage the fact that we have 500 players looking at the plots, as opposed to one scientist looking at one plot. We used bioinformatics math techniques to figure out what we thought was the best solution for the 500 players. When we compared the best solution to what the scientists did… the gamers did better. The reason the gamers did better is because there were more gamers.”
Jerome Waldisful, an assistant professor of computer science at McGill University, added: “Project Discovery is about empowering players by allowing them to contribute to science. But what’s unique about this project is that it shows that games are an essential tool in some way for how we do science in the future… This community is fundamentally contributing to society change by bringing the collective power to infuse science into society through digital games. And I think that should really change everyone’s perception of what games bring to the world today.”
