A group of McGill University computer scientists, in collaboration with private sector partners, has developed a citizen science video game in which players are helping to map the genetic sequences of the human microbiome.
Borderlands Science, a mini-game within the popular Borderlands 3 game, was created by a team led by McGill computer science professor Jérôme Waldispühl in conjunction with Attila Szantner, an adjunct professor at McGill and CEO and co-founder of Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS) of Switzerland. The team partnered with game developers Gearbox Entertainment and with the Microsetta Initiative at UC San Diego, which studies the 40 trillion microbial cells in the human gut known as the microbiome.
“Microbes are everywhere,” said Dr. Waldispühl. “To make the connections between microbes and [health], you need to classify them; you need to understand the diversity of microbes and how they relate to each other. And once you have a map, you can start doing that research.”
Creating that map is extremely time-consuming, he said, because there are millions of sequences and no algorithm that can do the job perfectly. “So then came the idea that we should find a way to engage more people in this curation process.”
The group published a study in Nature Biotechnology in April demonstrating that their approach to the gamification of scientific tasks can deliver big benefits to the scientific community. The study noted that two of the previous barriers to success with citizen science have been recruitment and engagement; previous games have been more “science” than “game” and appealed only to a subset of gamers who were already interested in science.
Attila Szantner’s Swiss IT company, MMOS, has been working to solve this engagement problem for the past decade.
“Our innovation was that, instead of trying to solve this problem ourselves, why don’t we team up with the masters of engagement – video game designers and developers – and ask them two things?” said Mr. Szantner. “One is for their often decades-long expertise in how to build something which is really fun and really engaging for players, and [the other is] for access to their established communities of millions of gamers.”
In 2016, Mr. Szantner contacted Randy Pitchford, founder and president of Gearbox, the Texas-based company that created Borderlands, one of the best-selling franchises in the video game industry. Unlike many of the gaming executives Mr. Szantner had previously approached, he said, “Pitchford immediately understood the implications and said, ‘I want it in one of our games.’”
Sébastien Caisse, co-studio head of Gearbox Studio Québec then reached out to Dr. Waldispühl about creating the game at the Québec studio. “I care a lot about scientific literacy,” said Dr. Caisse. “I was very inspired by what Jérôme was doing. I thought, okay, I think our game designers can take this a step further.” With Pitchford’s backing, Dr. Caisse’s team went to work.
“It became a dialogue with the McGill folks on how to basically make sure that this would be fun,” said Dr. Caisse. “It would be within the fiction of the game. It wouldn’t break engagement, but it was also key that it would be scientifically useful.”
Borderlands Science, which players (or “vault hunters”) can find inside a retro-style video arcade game within the world of Borderlands 3, involves matching tiles to align as many columns – representing fragments of specific DNA material – as possible. Scientists then use players’ solutions to better understand the alignment of those genetic sequences.
Since its release in April 2020, Borderlands Science has had more than four million players solve more than 135 million science puzzles – a task, the study notes, that is “unsolvable by a single individual.”
“The hope is that this research will lead to better treatments for conditions related to gut health, such as Alzheimer’s and cancer,” said Dr. Waldispühl. “What we’re trying to do here is to make science more ubiquitous. … I think that can change society.”