Meta to the meta
One of the bright spots I enjoyed, during the dismal skid mark that was 2020, was my co-authorship of a review article on the continued adoption of crowd sourcing and open innovation approaches in the life sciences. This was the third (and most likely final) in a series of pieces related to novel ways of performing research with crowds. That work is here, and I lovingly refer to this trio of articles as our very own Cornetto Trilogy (an homage to the Three Flavours Cornetto Saga).
As part of that work, in addition to summarizing the current state of affairs, we cast a futurist’s eye to the, er, future, and took a punt on some of the trends we saw evolving on how research could possibly be done. One of the opportunities we identified was the rise of the use of digital gaming platforms to host ‘Serious Scientific Discovery’ games in the service of novel life sciences research.
To make sure we’re on the same page here, imagine playing an online video game, and then, within that game, engaging in an activity (which could itself be framed as a game) but that was actually directly contributing to an ongoing research activity.
Woah.
That’s meta.
In our article we highlight the MMOS program which looks to connect scientific research and video games as a single seamless experience. They created an image classification mini-game, and embedded it into the popular EVE Online platform. As described in this work, this effort saw the participation of >300 000 EVE Online participants providing >30 million classifications of fluorescence microscopy images. Those annotations served as input to deep learning methods, which resulted in the creation of readily improvable image classification models.
This served as the first example of Project Discovery, which has since morphed into a mini-game that marshals the EVE Online community’s efforts in the study of the human immune system’s response to the novel coronavirus currently plaguing the planet. As of late October, there were >400,000 players who were participating in this mini-game, having contributed almost 2 million analysis tasks since the project launched in June 2020. There’s a lovely Wired article that provides more background on this, that you can find here. In addition to EVE Online, MMOS scientific mini-games can be found in the Borderlands 3 platform also.
As an open innovation tactic, the act of packaging ‘science’, and embedding it in a place of high ‘foot’ traffic (i.e. on a gaming platform), seems extremely powerful - and quite underutilized; to my knowledge, at this time, no major life sciences company is participating in such activities.
I use quotations marks around ‘foot’ in the above sentence as, of course, no one is physically traveling anywhere, and yet real activities are engaged in, and meaningful outcomes are realized. This is perhaps the bigger point, and one brought firmly into focus recently with Facebook’s recent renaming (and reorientation) towards enabling their vision of a ‘metaverse’. For society in general, the idea that persistent immersive online platforms proliferate, and that those platforms increasingly contain opportunities for ‘work’ is both thrilling and terrifying in near equal measure.
