EVE Online is a massively multiplayer online game where players can mine planets, fight other players in all-out war, and fly through wormholes to reach new destinations. It is now helping scientists learn more about COVID-19.
Through a citizen science project called Project Discovery, players can help real-world scientists solve problems that require human input, such as helping scientists discover new planets. Over the past year, they’ve helped scientists learn more about COVID-19.
To date, 327,000 players have completed 1.37 million in-game scan tasks, saving scientists 330.69 years of research into how the immune system responds to COVID-19. Speaking to IGN, EVE Online Creative Director Bergur Finnbogason explained how the project got started.
“This is a project that was originally started by, or at least an idea of [Massively Multiplayer Online Science CEO and co-founder Attila Szantner] a few years ago, where he was looking at citizen science projects around the world , around the world. Internet,” Finnbogason said. “He started to see that pattern in those projects where basically…these fantastic projects would happen…with super worthy causes…but people would come, try once, and then never come back.
Seeing that people were so quick to abandon these projects, the parties involved devised a way to fuse citizen science projects with something that would make people want to stick around. This is where the idea of putting one of these projects into an MMO – a genre with communities of people who do the complete opposite of trying something once and never touching it again – was born.
Finnbogason and Szantner said they came up with the idea of merging citizen science projects while trying to get input from real humans with EVE. If the game offered a science project to help real-world scientists, players would be dedicated to it. Thus, Project Discovery was born.
The first Project Discovery project in EVE focused on identifying proteins in human cells and the second Project Discovery project focused on finding actual exoplanets or distant planets outside of our solar system. Similar to the COVID-19 minigame, EVE players played an in-game minigame to browse datasets of luminosity curves, which depicted the brightness of stars as planets passed through them. It has helped scientists discover exoplanets in space.
“Our latest installment is this COVID-19 project,” Finnbogason said. “We’ve been using it for almost a year, or exactly a year now, and yeah, it’s super exciting and it’s really turned into a wonderful project.”
If you were to log into EVE to participate in this COVID-19 project, you would find that it is extremely well implemented in-game. What players do when playing the associated mini-game is watch a group of multicolored dots. Some are yellow, some are red, some are green, etc.
“Each dot is a cell,” said Ryan Brinkman, professor of medical genetics at the University of British Columbia and leading scientist at BC Cancer. “It’s placed on a 2D graph based on the extent to which it expresses one of many different types of cell surface proteins that can be used to define cell function.”
Pictured are two clusters of cells that a player identified in the Project Discovery COVID-19 mini-game in EVE Online, Photo Credit: CCP Games
Players playing the COVID-19 Project Discovery minigame in EVE will see this 2D graphic with multi-colored dot cells. All they have to do is use a point-and-click system to draw polygons around the main mass of the clusters. Players earn set rewards when they reach specific ranks associated with the minigame. For example, at Rank 5 players earn the Biosecurity Response Team Mask and at Rank 650 they can earn the Marshal Biosecurity Responders skin.
“Drawing the polygon allows us to count the number of [cell surface proteins] in that polygon,” Brinkman said. “The number in a given population can change depending on, for example, the disease of a drug and we can look for similar changes in groups of people (sick or healthy) to make the discovery… or use it for the diagnosis.
How EVE Online helps scientists in our world
How exactly does this help scientists in the real world? Well, the simplest answer is time. Players completed the equivalent of over 330 years of work that scientists would otherwise have had to do to match what players did.
“The alternative for scientists is to search everywhere,” Brinkman said of how players analyze 40 dimensions of data on a 2D plane that dramatically speeds up finding data. “Scientists can’t do that, though, because to analyze a single sample takes an hour…but we have an endless supply of monkeys, all banging on typewriters.”
What the players are doing is helping scientists better understand how our immune systems are affected by this new coronavirus, according to Brinkman. They do this by measuring the chemical makeup of cells, a process also known as flow cytometry in the science world, to determine a body’s immune response to COVID-19.
Science projects made through video games are not necessarily a new concept. Folding@home, a project that used the PlayStation 3 among other processors to help scientists develop new therapies by simulating protein movement and protein folding, began as early as 2000 and is still ongoing six years ago. month. Never before, however, has this been done on such a massive scale as EVE’s massive player base.
EVE Online – Project Discovery
EVE Online – Project Discovery
Brinkman said the project is 60% COVID-19 aid and 40% hands-on A.I. machine learning, which is another way this EVE minigame is helping the world of science.
“The other really exciting part is that there have been approaches that have been developed to automate this analysis process and they all suck,” Brinkman said. “This has been my life’s work for 15 years and all [automated analytics processes] suck for various reasons. The current excitement in the scientific world is A.I. machine learning. Everyone is excited about it. “
The reason processes “harm” is simple: for a machine to learn, someone or something has to teach it to learn, and for the most part, until Project Discovery, that wasn’t possible.
Over 300,000 EVE players participated in this iteration of the Project Discovery minigame. They literally provide the necessary examples of how to analyze data – in this case, COVID-19 cell data and how the virus affects the human immune system. Brinkman explained that this kind of data will accelerate areas of science outside of COVID-19 — areas of science that will have a huge impact on human health.
Why EVE Online players participate in Project Discovery
Brinkman said they were at the heart of it all with this data, with the intention of releasing the results this time next year – but are gamers aware of what a simple mini-game does for the world? real, or are they just here for the EVE rewards?
“We’ve seen three categories of players playing this,” Finnbogason said. “One of them is definitely right in the lore of the game and… playing it for that reason. Then there is another group playing for the awards. I think the larger group, however, is playing for science and the rewards are just a bonus and maybe a strong incentive for everyone to keep playing.
Finnbogason said the EVE team worked hard to make this COVID-19 project discovery effort look like something that belonged to EVE. It was really important to the in-universe theme team because “we owe it to our players,” Finnbogason said. He said the team didn’t want the game to break the fourth wall or immersion to be felt anywhere else in the game.
The first Project Discovery, the one that tasked players with identifying proteins in human cells, was centered around a faction of the game called the Sisters of EVE, who sought out a new emerging race of enemies called the Drifters and their tissue samples. The COVID-19 project, however, is run by an in-game entity called Concord, which is the same entity that ran the exoplanets project.
UNIMORE Lab – Content Warning: Blood
UNIMORE Lab – Content Warning: Blood
There are four other rules that the EVE team follows beyond immersion when carrying out these projects: the project must be altruistic in nature, which means that none of the parties involved take money from the project; they should be consistent in length, so players always know what they are signing up for when playing the minigame; they need to produce a significant dataset, although players have continued to clear just beyond the team’s dataset goals; and finally, they need complexity to keep people interested.
“There was so much player interest in this project from the start,” Finnbogason said. “We started this last March and everyone just doubled over and jumped on it and it felt like and still feels like people want to help solve this pandemic in any way they can. We are simply very honored and honored to have contributed to this. “
The project has been implemented in the game for over a year now, but there’s not much end in sight at the moment, or at least the team doesn’t really know when a new Project Discovery minigame will be released. will take place. They like to stick to one at a time, so the COVID-19 related project is the one for now.
“Yeah, so one thing about machine learning is you can never have enough data,” Brinkman said. “It’s clear. The more datasets we get, the better. Even though we have vaccines, the science of COVID-19 is unsolved. For example, why is COVID-19 so bad, what does this disease do to the immune system, why do people lose their sense of smell and taste… there are all these bad things that are truly unique to COVID-19, and we haven’t even scratched that surface.
The success of project discovery
Project Discovery has been a resounding success, both in its first two ventures and in its current COVID-19 venture. It even allowed EVE Online to make the cover of one of the world’s most important scientific publications, Nature Biotechnology, which was the first time a fictional spacecraft, or anything fictional, appeared on the cover of this scientific journal.
“That, to me, was a sign that scientists were embracing what we’re doing,” Szantner said. “They take it very seriously…and can see how big communities of players [like EVE’s] can greatly help research projects. This is a very, very important message. “
Elsewhere in the media, Project Discovery earned the EVE Online team a nomination for the 2021 Webby Awards, and according to CCP Games, they are currently in first place for the People’s Vote award.
Video games are huge, Szantner said, and over time it’s important to him that society finds new ways for games to have a positive impact on the world.
“The games are bigger than they’ve ever been,” he said. “It’s a big question of what we can do with them and you know, I think it’s about getting as much value out of them as possible and that’s basically what we’re doing with Project Discovery. That’s at least one way to do it. You’re just solving virtual puzzles in a video game, but something as simple as solving a virtual problem in the game…does so much for the real world now.”
Finnbogason said the more they learned about what gamers are accomplishing with Project Discovery, the more humbling it all became.
“It’s very humbling for us as developers,” he said. “MMOs are so much about building relationships and promoting human interaction, and so this is, I think, another project that proves that the line between games and reality is merging. It’s a very interesting and exciting time for us and who knows what’s next. “
Szantner said he hopes the next step will be for other developers to join in, and some have already done so. A science-based citizen science project can be found in Borderlands 3, but Szantner sees limitless potential for what games and their players can do for science.
“I think it’s a very important project, almost like a mission, to show the world that it works,” he said. “Ultimately, the more game developers that come on board and the more communities of gamers join, the further we progress in building a virtually limitless human computing engine.
“It was a miracle to pull off Project Discovery. Now it’s proven and now we can show that it works. We can now show that it brings value to gaming communities, game development companies, and science. I think it’s a much easier decision for game developers to step in and implement it in games…and I hope to see more of that in the future. »
Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance writer, guide, and science guru with a particular interest in the intersection of science and gaming. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.
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