At the beginning, there was Foldit



This adventure started in 2013, in a small office in Brighton (UK). I was researching free to play, casual browser games. After compiling a huge list of these online games, I was ready to try them. Everything was going smoothly. I had finished sowing a few seeds and harvesting some trees in Farmerama and I was about to move to the next game on the list: Foldit



Maybe I should have just added ‘client game’ to the relevant section of my list and started conquering ancient Greece in Grepolis. Instead I clicked the ‘download’ button and installed Foldit.

I was presented with a series of 3D puzzles to solve, from ‘backbone’ level 1-1 to ‘DNA and molecule’ level 8-4. I was now mutating a protein to form more hydrogen bonds. Unexpectedly and serendipitously, I was participating in scientific research! Not that casual er! But, the game is free to play, I had that criteria right.

The next thing I knew, I was back home, designing my first proteins, reading about

My first surprise was having to download a client despite my research being on games that I could play directly in my browser.Maybe I should have just added ‘client game’ to the relevant section of my list and started conquering ancient Greece in Grepolis. Instead I clicked the ‘download’ button and installed Foldit.I was presented with a series of 3D puzzles to solve, from ‘backbone’ level 1-1 to ‘DNA and molecule’ level 8-4. I was now mutating a protein to form more hydrogen bonds. Unexpectedly and serendipitously, I was participating in scientific research! Not that casual er! But, the game is free to play, I had that criteria right.The next thing I knew, I was back home, designing my first proteins, reading about amino acids, HIV and monomeric retroviral proteases . I had just discovered the World of Science.



Harnessing games for science As a planet we spend 3 billion hours a week playing online games. If even a fraction of that time can be harnessed for science, laboratories around the world would have access to some rather impressive cognitive machinery.

Dara Mohammadi Scientists have started taking advantage of our love for games to conduct scientific research. There is an increasing number of research-driven games. They generate tangible results and publications and can lead to important discoveries. The most recent example is Sea Hero Quest. The mobile game was released in May 2016 and the team recently shared their first results in this video. The app has been downloaded almost 2.5 million times, representing 63 years of play and provided scientists with over 9,500 years worth of data. Sea Hero Quest is now the largest dementia study in history. The developers, Glitchers, were nominated for the Game for impact award, Deutsche Telekom, which funded the project, won 2 European Excellence Awards as well as 9 Lion Cannes awards.

