Attila Szantner (left) and Bernard Revaz (right), the founders of Massively Multiplayer Online Science, hope to use video games to drive research. Photograph by Nicolas Righetti / Courtesy Indigo Pearl

On a warm evening in 2014, Attila Szantner, a Hungarian Web entrepreneur, and his friend Bernard Revaz, a Swiss physics researcher, sat on a balcony in Geneva and discussed the perils of video games. The medium’s greatest threat, they concluded, is not that it turns people into vicious killers, or that it dulls their communication skills, or that it sunders their minds from reality. No, the problem is that, in providing players with a sense of accomplishment, games may distract our species from genuine achievement. Who hasn’t felt a house-proud throb of satisfaction at clearing a clutter of Tetris blocks or landing a rocket ship on the moon after centuries of effort in Civilization? Like crosswords and pornography, these activities are both alluring and vacuous: they do little to meet life’s challenges on this side of the screen. But it occurred to Szantner and Revaz that the tremendous amount of time and energy that people put into games could be co-opted in the name of human progress. That year, they founded Massively Multiplayer Online Science, a company that pairs game makers with scientists.

This past March, the first fruits of their conversation in Geneva appeared in EVE Online, a complex science-fiction game set in a galaxy composed of tens of thousands of stars and planets, and inhabited by half a million or so people from across the Internet, who explore and do battle daily. EVE was launched in 2003 by C.C.P., a studio based in Reykjavík, but players have only recently begun to contribute to scientific research. Their task is to assist with the Human Protein Atlas (H.P.A.), a Swedish-run effort to catalogue proteins and the genes that encode them, in both normal tissue and cancerous tumors. “Humans are, by evolution, very good at quickly recognizing patterns,” Emma Lundberg, the director of the H.P.A.’s Subcellular Atlas, a database of high-resolution images of fluorescently dyed cells, told me. “This is what we exploit in the game.”

The work, dubbed Project Discovery, fits snugly into EVE Online’s universe. At any point, players can take a break from their dogfighting, trading, and political machinations to play a simple game within the game, finding commonalities and differences between some thirteen million microscope images. In each one, the cell’s innards have been color-coded—blue for the nucleus (the cell’s brain), red for microtubules (the cell’s scaffolding), and green for anywhere that a protein has been detected. After completing a tutorial, players tag the image using a list of twenty-nine options, including “nucleus,” “cytoplasm,” and “mitochondria.” When enough players reach a consensus on a single image, it is marked as “solved” and handed off to the scientists at the H.P.A. “In terms of the pattern recognition and classification, it resembles what we are doing as researchers,” Lundberg said. “But the game interface is, of course, much cooler than our laboratory information-management system. I would love to work in-game only.”

An example of the Project Discovery interface. Courtesy Indigo Pearl Courtesy Indigo Pearl

Rather than presenting the project as a worthy extracurricular activity, EVE Online’s designers have cast it as an extension of the game’s broader fiction. Players work for the Sisters of EVE, a religious humanitarian-aid organization, which rewards their efforts with virtual currency. This can be used to purchase items in the game, including a unique set of armor designed by one of the C.C.P.’s artists, Andrei Cristea. (The armor is available only to players who participate in Project Discovery, and therefore, like a rare Coco Chanel frock, is desirable as much for its scarcity as for its design.) Insuring that the mini-game be thought of as more than a short-term novelty or diversion was an issue that Linzi Campbell, Project Discovery’s lead designer, considered carefully. “The hardest challenge has been turning the image-analysis process into a game that is strong enough to motivate the player to continue playing,” Campbell told me. “The fun comes from the feeling of mastery.”

Evidently, her efforts were successful. On the game’s first day of release, there were four hundred thousand submissions from players. According to C.C.P., some people have been so caught up in the task that they have played for fifteen hours without interruption. “EVE players turned out to be a perfect crowd for this type of citizen science,” Lundberg said. She anticipates that the first phase of the project will be completed this summer. If the work meets this target, players will be presented with more advanced images and tasks, such as the classification of protein patterns in complex tumor-tissue samples. Eventually, their efforts could aid in the development of new cancer drugs.

Project Discovery isn’t the first initiative to parasitically employ lay computing power to perform research. Since 2000, folding@home has asked volunteers to install software that uses the idle processing resources of their PCs to simulate the ways in which proteins assemble to break down food into energy, regulate moods, and fight illness. Through this work, scientists at Stanford University hope to better understand how and why proteins misfold, an error that leads to numerous serious diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and many cancers. More recently, in 2012, the Danish research group ScienceAtHome launched Quantum Moves, a game in which players’ mice stand in for the laser beams that are used to manipulate the atoms in a quantum computer. According to ScienceAtHome’s Web site, the game relies on the innate ingenuity of the human brain, “not textbook knowledge.”

Gamification, the art of reframing chores as contests, has its limits, particularly when the task being performed has equivocal results. As Nathan Heller wrote in his review of Jane McGonigal’s “SuperBetter”—a book that purports to help readers tackle anxiety, depression, and other physical and mental ailments with a “gameful” attitude—“far from freeing the mind, the approach habituates us to the tidy mechanisms of effort and reward, to established paths, and to prefab narratives.” Nevertheless, for the rote tasks that are the bread and butter of most scientific research, gamification can be a natural complement—especially since so many video games already simulate labor. The fact that the core work is mundane and repetitive doesn’t mean that it has to be boring. A team at Georgia Tech, led by Mark Riedl, is attempting to see whether research-enabling games can be made more intrinsically fun, rather than, as in Project Discovery, relying on extrinsic rewards. The team has created a version of Super Mario Bros. in which the familiar plump mushrooms and flowers of Nintendo’s seminal game are replaced by other kinds of items that require categorization. At the start of each level, players are told to collect, for example, only items that can be bought in a grocery store, or, alternatively, only those sold in a department store. In this way, players contribute to sorting efforts like those in Project Discovery, but in a more traditionally gamelike way. It is research defined by genre.

Szantner, for his part, hopes to expand his company’s practice to include more varied kinds of games. (The group recently announced a partnership with the Texan studio Gearbox Software, the creator of the first-person shooter Borderlands.) “For the leaders of these major game studios, the idea that their game can contribute to important real-life research is just amazing,” he said. “It’s easy to convince them to take part. We live in an age when doing science is sexy.”