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When Borderlands Science was announced in 2020, I thought it sounded a little silly. Science? In my Borderlands? I thought that was much less likely than Dr. Mayim Bialik thought. However, McGill University, the institution leading the project, says that the project is indeed a huge success and will “significantly advance our knowledge of the microbiome and improve AI programs”, so from the start Turns out I was stupid. It will be used to perform this task in the future. ”
Science in Borderlands does not occur through regular gameplay, but through the Borderlands Science mini-game built into Borderlands 3. That’s what drove my skepticism about the whole thing. Borderlands is all about endlessly shooting truckloads of men. How many players are going to leave and spend their time playing non-violent mini-games?
As it turns out, that number is around 4.5 million people. “These researchers are helping to trace the evolutionary relationships of more than 1 million species of bacteria that live in the human gut, some of which have important implications for our health,” McGill said in a press release. “There are also bacteria that play an important role.” “This information represents an exponential increase in what has been discovered to date about the microbiome. By aligning rows of tiles representing the genetic components of different microorganisms, we can can now perform tasks that even the best existing computer algorithms cannot yet solve.”
Now that the project has been successfully completed, McGill seems to admit that he was a little unsure about the whole thing.
Jerome Waldispuer, associate professor at McGill University’s School of Computer Science, said: “We don’t know if players of popular games like Borderlands 3 will be interested, or if it’s enough to improve what is already known about microbial evolution. “We didn’t know if we would get results or not.” Scientist and senior author of the study, published today in Nature. “But we were surprised by the results. In half a day, a player in Borderlands His Science could receive data about his DNA sequences of microorganisms that the previous game, His Phylo, had collected over his 10 years. collected five times more data than he did.
That’s another interesting part of this study. Borderlands Science has demonstrated that citizen science projects like this can have a huge impact when integrated into games in a way that isn’t, to use scientific terminology, terrible. The Nature paper states that a typical “citizen science game” would be a “huge success” if it reached 500,000 players (a fraction of what Borderlands Science achieved). , the main reason is that it’s difficult to convince people to play games, especially in the name of science. effort.
For example, Phylo “struggled to retain players beyond a few puzzles,” with users completing an average of 5.7 tasks and a median of 2. Borderlands Science players completed an average of 35 tasks, with a median of 12.
The downside to this approach is that it puts more emphasis on the “game” part of the project, and inevitably lessens the “science” aspect. McGill said Borderlands Science had “pushed the boundaries of gamification” and, as expected, the “average scientific contribution” of a single result was significantly lower than Philo. However, “BLS’s super-gamification resulted in significantly higher player engagement and retention than Phylo, greatly mitigating its downside.”
The game-centric approach had other spin-off benefits. McGill said the most common response from gamers to Borderlands Science is “enthusiasm and curiosity about science,” which is certainly difficult to quantify, but the school believes that “game-first design” He said he believes this is the main driver of enthusiasm and engagement.
“Furthermore, beyond optimizing the trade-offs described above, the inherent benefits of participating in citizen science initiatives, such as increasing scientific literacy and strengthening connections with the scientific community, encourage exploration of additional gamification areas. Even more justified. It’s a trade-off,” McGill said. “Getting more participants is a valid objective in itself.”
As for what’s being done with all the data from Borderlands Science, Rob Knight of the University of California, San Diego’s Department of Pediatrics, Bioengineering, and Computer Science & Engineering said researchers are looking at specific types of He said he hopes to link microorganisms with food. aging and various diseases. “Evolution is a good guide to function, so having a better tree to relate microbes to each other will give us a more accurate picture of what they’re doing inside and around us. “It will be,” Knight said.
“There are 4.5 million people here who have contributed to science. In a sense, this result is also theirs, and they should be proud of it,” Valdispur said. “This shows that we can combat fears and misconceptions that the public may have about science and start building communities that work together to advance knowledge.”
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