文丨Nameless 审核丨菜包
Typesetting丨Lu Jiu
Good news!
Misplaced diagram. Ahem, good news, in addition to the "2008 Moving China Special Award" and "2006 Time Magazine Person of the Year", you can add a strong stroke, that is-
"Participated in the research on the gut microbiome atlas of McGill University, and the results were published in Nature Biotechnology. ”
Do you suddenly feel that your social status has risen a lot!
And it's all because you've played Borderlands 3.
Facts have proved that those who play stinky games are still very helpful to society!
However, this study on the gut microbiome atlas is not a "direct study of the gamer's body", but in "Unowned
A mini-game has been added to Lands 3 to aid in research.
In 2020, Gearbox Software partnered with McGill University in Canada, the Microsetta Initiative, the world's largest citizen science microbiology initiative, and Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS) to release an arcade puzzle mini-game built into Borderlands 3, Borderlands Science , which aims to help scientists map the human gut microbe.
McGill University has also turned this research into a small game that can be understood at every moment. Upon arriving at the in-game base "Vault 3", players will be able to find an arcade machine in the vault. Turn on the arcade machine and start helping scientists analyze gut microbes.
The gameplay is similar to Match, where the player has to keep pushing the squares upwards to get the blocks in the right place, so that each row becomes the same color. This kind of gameplay can't be said to be very easy for players, but it is not difficult at all. In addition, there are rewards for playing levels, and many players are willing to take on the challenge of high scores.
However, even a small game with such a simple mechanism contains the most cutting-edge scientific truth that seems to have nothing to do with the industry.
Now, four years later, the study is finally complete.
Jérôme Waldispühl, associate professor at McGill University, who published the study April 15 in the journal Nature Biotechnology, said that five times more microbial DNA sequence data was generated using game data compared to previous work, and said the study would "dramatically improve our understanding of the microbiome and improve the AI used to do this work in the future."
There is a lot of repetitive but very important work in scientific research, the threshold is low but a lot of data is needed, and it is obviously worth the loss to find someone to do it, many research institutes have thought of implanting small games into the game to collect samples, so that players can be happy, and experiments can also get data, it is really Qin Shi Huang going down the stairs - a win in the end.
Historically, it is not uncommon to see cases like this "science in the game".
In 2016, EVE partnered with the Human Protein Atlas project team in Sweden to begin a special project called Project Discovery, which aims to classify and harden protein chromosomes in human cells.
However, in the face of tens of millions of samples, AI was still lacking in the ability to distinguish images at that time, and only relied on human classification to score until the Year of the Monkey. So, the EVE team added a little game to the game – and there were rewards for it, of course. Players can earn in-game currency, costumes, ships, and more by playing mini-games.
Many players go to play in their free time. With the help of 300,000 EVE players, 33 million samples were sorted after two years. Afterwards, Swedish scientists made the results of this research public, and contributed to the scientific development of the whole world.
In 2017, the second phase of the exploration project was launched, "exoplanets", and the science project was changed from biology to astronomy, and players had to determine whether there were planets based on how bright the stars were.
The following year, a professor from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Geneva, who was in charge of the project, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, and the Discovery Program provided him with a wealth of research data.
The 2020 Quest also included research into coronavirus data, where players can help scientists understand its effects on the body's immune system.
When the elders in your family asked you what you were doing when you sat in front of the computer and fiddled with the mouse and replied:
"Analyzing the data provided by the flow cytometer, plotting polygons around the cell population, participating in the analysis of the novel coronavirus data, and other related flow cytometry charts can help scientists gain insight into how the body's immune system is affected by this novel coronavirus. ”
All of the above have an official scientific name - "Citizen Science Game", which is simply a use of numbers to win, which is essentially the same as filling out various collection forms, but replaced with a mode that most people like.
Although video games are a form of entertainment, they incorporate a variety of advanced technologies, such as hardware technology, graphics processing technology, audio processing technology, etc., and most importantly, have a "human" mind. Moreover, this kind of gameplay usually does not allow players to work for free, which can not only contribute to science, but also have rewards to get, and the player's enthusiasm is naturally high.
And it's the easiest way to do it — you can't ask a scientist who's been doing research all his life to make a triple-A game that will appeal to thousands of players in a matter of days, so why not add a puzzle game to the game.
In fact, it's not just science games that can help with research, but also a good way to study games directly. I'm sure everyone has heard of the Warcraft plague incident.
In 2005, World of Warcraft updated the troll city of Zur Grab with a boss that added the "Fallen Blood" debuff to the player, which is equivalent to the plague, contagious and extremely damaging. Some players took advantage of a bug to take this debuff out of the dungeon, resulting in more than 4 million World of Warcraft players being infected with "Fallen Blood", comparable to the real-life Black Death. Even Blizzard itself did not expect this effect, and tried many methods but failed to prevent the spread of "Fallen Blood", and finally had no choice but to redo a reset.
Because of its huge impact, the "Fallen Blood" event was once rated as one of the top five events in the history of MMORPG by the MMOCrunch website.
The "Fallen Blood" event has attracted the attention of the public health community, and this great plague that occurred in the virtual world has brought them a good sample for study, because it is very similar to the real plague in the pattern of outbreak and transmission, and even the US CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) asked Blizzard for information about this incident.
At that time, there was an American college student named "Eric Lofgren", who was himself a World of Warcraft player, and with the help of his mentor, wrote a paper on "How Virtual Worlds Can Help Study Infectious Diseases in the Real World", which was later published in the famous medical journal The Lancet.
Thirteen years later, Eric, who has become a veteran epidemiologist, has been researching how the U.S. healthcare system has responded to the coronavirus during the pandemic.
Games are not only shining in the field of public health and safety, but also in the field of social sciences. Recently, Philippe Villeneuve, the chief architect in charge of the site's restoration, said that the cathedral will reopen on the eve of the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Before you know it, the renovation of Notre Dame Cathedral has been going on for 5 years.
Although it has been affected by various factors such as the new crown epidemic, it is still very gratifying to see that Notre Dame Cathedral is about to be renovated. The restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral has been helped by people from all over the world, including our good friend, Ayu.
After the fire, Ubisoft donated 500,000 euros to his home country to help repair Notre Dame Cathedral, and also gave Assassin's Creed: Revolution a free week for players to visit Notre Dame Cathedral in the game. He also shared his measurements of Notre Dame Cathedral and expressed his full support for the restoration work.
During the development of Ubisoft's Creed: Revolution, Ubisoft's Senior Level Designer Caroline Miousse worked with historians to complete the digital restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral in the game's open world.
Although this data will not play a decisive role, it will show us the positive effect of games on society.
In fact, there are many examples of games promoting the development of science, such as the earliest "Foldit", "Phylo", etc., in which countless players continue to play games for scientific research. Since the advent of video games in the 50s of the last century, they have developed together with hardware and other technologies, from the earliest pixels to today's realistic graphics, and the types of games have been constantly subdivided. The core of games is to provide entertainment for people, but nowadays, in addition to providing entertainment, games are also taking on more and more social roles.
As Jérôme Waldispühl puts it: "There are 4.5 million people here who contribute to science." In a sense, this achievement is theirs, and they should be proud of it. ”
I play games, I'm proud!