The challenge of designing scientific discovery games

Abstract

Incorporating the individual and collective problem solving skills of non-experts into the scientific discovery process could potentially accelerate the advancement of science. This paper discusses the design process used for Foldit, a multiplayer online biochemistry game that presents players with computationally difficult protein folding problems in the form of puzzles, allowing ordinary players to gain expertise and help solve these problems. The principle challenge of designing such scientific discovery games is harnessing the enormous collective problem-solving potential of the game playing population, who have not been previously introduced to the specific problem, or, often, the entire scientific discipline. To address this challenge, we took an iterative approach to designing the game, incorporating feedback from players and biochemical experts alike. Feedback was gathered both before and after releasing the game, to create the rules, interactions, and visualizations in Foldit that maximize contributions from game players. We present several examples of how this approach guided the game's design, and allowed us to improve both the quality of the gameplay and the application of player problem-solving.

Crowdsourcing—Harnessing the Masses to Advance Health and Medicine, a Systematic Review

“…Additionally, there is the advantage of an untapped expertise of the crowd. Even though these crowdsourced projects are not asking scientific experts to participate, participants have been found to be experts at puzzles and problem solving, which would make them specifically adept at solving protein structures in Foldit 12,13,[17][18][19]21 and solving multiple sequence alignment with Phylo. 23 Presumably, among members of the public one could find experts at many different tasks, especially when the task is presented as a game that benefits science.…”

“…Six of these used Foldit, an online game that allows users to manipulate the three-dimensional structures of proteins in order to find the most likely tertiary structure. 12,13,[17][18][19]21 Also described was the online game Phylo, where users moved colored blocks representing different nucleotides of a gene promoter sequence around on screen in order to make the most parsimonious phylogenetic tree. 23 …”

Crowdsourcing for Information Visualization: Promises and Pitfalls

“…Experimenters can also consider using gamification (e.g., FoldIt [33]) and use one or both of two approaches. First, evaluated tasks could be gamified: participants would solve game-like tasks that are designed to translate or hide a meaningful research question.…”

Games on Multiword Expressions for Community Building

“…The same author advocates that players of a GWAP should know in advance the purpose of a game and contribute to its fulfillment of their own free will -the "entertainment" will help in doing it. Moreover, she also claims that besides doing tedious and uninteresting tasks in a human-processing unit (HPU) scenario, games should be designed for skilled professionals to perform complex and creative work, as has been already done, for instance, in the protein folding game Foldit (Cooper et al, 2010).…”