Virtual Universe to Install 'Gamer Science' Project

EVE Online, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that is known for it’s internet spaceships and awesome science fiction visuals, is about to launch a real-world crowdsourcing science project within the game mechanic, using a huge player base to help characterize proteins in the human body.

The initiative, called Project Discovery, will operate as a mini-game within the EVE Online universe, allowing in-game characters, known as “capsuleers,” to overview microscopic images of human cells and tissue. In doing so, the project’s real world scientists hope to capitalize on a captive audience to study a huge quantity of images that require the human eye to identify and categorize certain biological structures.

Mapping human proteins is necessary to find novel treatments and understanding diseases such as cancer. By characterizing where the proteins are located and how they are shaped, scientists can better find these treatments by working out what these proteins do. But it is a huge task that would require an army of scientists to work on.

Citizen science projects depend on public participation to often make groundbreaking discoveries. For example, the Galaxy Zoo project has thousands of participants identifying different classifications of galaxy to seek out cosmic patterns and, along the way, discover some interesting quirks about the human brain.

Recently, participants of the Planet Hunters project, which is an effort to seek out transit signals in NASA Kepler Space Telescope’s data, published a paper with professional astronomers detailing a strange transit signal coming from the star KIC 8462852. Most likely a cluster of comets, there is also some speculation (beyond the paper’s conclusions) that the object may be some kind of alien megastructure. Of course, the likelihood of this being the case is vanishingly slim, but the fact that it was a citizen science project that first identified this oddity, and potentially a phenomenon we’ve never seen before, shows how powerful these crowdsourcing projects can be.

But rather than making it a public effort to identify biological shapes in human cells and proteins Sweden-based scientists of The Human Protein Atlas, the Swiss company Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS) and researchers from Reykjavik University, Iceland, are bridging real-world science into the gaming world by teaming up with CCP Games, the Iceland-based company that develops EVE Online, leveraging gamers’ participation while rewarding them with in-game “loyalty points.”

“By playing this image analysis mini-game, that will give you ISK (the in-game currency) and Sisters of Eve loyalty points, you’ll be helping to improve the data in the Human Protein Atlas,” said CCP Games Executive Producer Andie Nordgren during the opening keynote speech at the EVE Vegas fan conference in Las Vegas on Friday (Oct. 23).

The data for Project Discovery comes from The Human Protein Atlas, which was founded in 2003, and the Stockholm-based group is currently building a publicly-available database of all known proteins found throughout the human body.

According to assistant professor Emma Lundberg, who is compiling the Subcellular Protein Atlas and spoke at EVE Vegas on Sunday (Oct. 25), categorizing these proteins “all comes down to pattern recognition.” Interestingly, Lundberg will have an in-game avatar called “Professor Lundberg,” a virtual scientist of the humanitarian aid organization the “Sisters of EVE,” to tutor capsuleers on how to identify different proteins.

Screenshot of the planned Project Discovery interface featuring real world microscopic images of human cells.

As an avid EVE Online player, I’m really excited to see how this mini-game performs inside the greater EVE universe. EVE is based around a cluster of thousands of jumpgate-connected stars called New Eden and can be populated by tens of thousands of active gamers at any time. It is a sandbox where player-generated content drives the rich diversity of this virtual world.

Read more at Discovery News