Question: Do scientists make videogames?

No, but if you hear about anyone doing that let me know and I’ll totally help out.

Actually that’s not quite true. It’s an interesting question in fact.

Scientists are wishing that more people would get involved in science. We look around and see everyone watching TV, or playing tetris on an iphone, and you think – Wow, if only people could spend some of their time doing science instead. How about we make science problems into a game? Could people help out then? [If you want to read about this, Google a guy called “Clay Shirky” and what he has to say about something called “the cognitive surplus”]

The problem is, how to make a game that might help science.

I know of one really awesome example from 2010.

Proteins are very important molecules. Long chains of amino acids. From the DNA of something we know what proteins it makes. To understand what a protein does we need to know what it looks like, in 3 dimensions. We can make a good guess what it looks like from the DNA, but it’s not a great guess. Some of the very fastest supercomputers in the world are looking at this – it’s called the Protein Folding Problem: predict what a protein molecule looks like, given only what it’s made of.

It’s like you have the technical drawings for a car. You have to look at those and try to work out what the finished car would look like. Once you see it you say “Oh, yes, of course” but before you’ve seen the finished product you’re saying “Err, so what goes in the middle, and what goes on the outside again?”

A guy called David Baker in Seattle in America worked with a few people and made a video game called Foldit. People could log in and play with structures of proteins on the computer screen. You could grab the molecule (on the screen) and move it around. The program would tell you if what you’d done was OK or not. It would calculate a score for you in real time.

People went nuts over this thing. People were coming back from work and playing all night. At the end of a couple of years of this, Baker compared what the people had done to what the computers had done. The people had done better. That was amazing.

But what was more amazing was the amount of science that had been done by regular people by changing the science into a computer game. Half of the Hall-of-Famers (the highest scoring humans) had no knowledge of biology above high school.

I think we’ll see more of this. There have been examples of *computers* being used to solve problems – look up SETI@home for example. There are recent examples of people getting involved with projects online (look up GalaxyZoo). But Foldit was actually a game, so wins the cool science videogame award.