Inside Reykjavik's bustling Harpa exhibition centre, players of Eve Online—an RPG where millions of players explore the depths of space through trade, combat, and propaganda—are being told they can change the world. In other years, attendees of the annual Eve Fanfest convention gather to meet online friends from the other side of the world, forge allegiances, and start in-game wars on the surprisingly rowdy pub-crawl. But this is no ordinary year. This year, Fanfest’s main stage plays host to Kyoto-prize winning scientist, Dr. Michel Mayor.

Famous for discovering the first ever exoplanet in 1995, Dr. Mayor finds himself experiencing another career first at Eve Fanfest. Mayor has swapped his usual audience of astronomy students for gaming's most notoriously devoted community—and, despite some early reservations, they lap up every word. Mayor explains the science behind Project Discovery, a mishmash of clever software and stat-grinding that crowdsources scientific research from players of Eve Online. His talk is not only heard in the busy auditorium, but also by thousands of curious viewers on Twitch. If nothing else, it's a clever piece of scientific outreach.

Like many ideas, Project Discovery began life in a bar, where Hungarian software engineer Attila Szantner posed a question to university researcher Bernard Revaz: what if, instead of just entertaining, video games could make the world a better place? Starting with the concept of citizen science—a research method which uses data gathered by regular citizens—Szantner mused that, as the world's most dedicated workers, gamers would be the ideal candidate for a new breed of scientific research.

Three years later, Szantner and Revaz turned their idea into a piece of software. Dubbed Massively Multiplayer Online Science, or MMOS for short, the software takes real-world scientific data and feeds it directly into games for study. Over the last year, MMOS has been used to turn thousands of Eve players into a well-oiled scientific research team. As a gamer himself, Szantner saw that the stat-grinding so beloved by Eve players would be an invaluable asset to the scientific community.

"Most games already contain elements that are boring, repetitive tasks," says Szantner, "yet we enjoy doing them. This is especially true in Eve. [Eve developer] CCP has been doing this for 14 years. It knows how to keep people engaged and entertained. Straight away we knew that Eve would be the perfect partner."

The first iteration of Project Discovery focused on the Human Protein Atlas, a scientific research program with the goal of exploring the human proteome. Eve players were asked to put aside their conflicts and help scientists understand the role of proteins in the body, as expressed by a cell, tissue, or organism. Transforming existing analysis techniques into a fun exercise, players diligently surveyed images of real-world cells in-game—where scientists had used antibodies to mark proteins—to locate where a particular protein appeared in each cell.

"If the protein is expressed in a cell like in mitochondria—which plays a role in energy production in the cell—then [researchers] know that it’s somehow connected to energy production," explains Szantner. "In instances where there's a problem with [energy production], scientists can then find the corresponding protein."

MMOS was expected to save researchers a few man-hours, but it has already seen players classify more than 28 million images.

"It's huge. We’re now in the process of analysing the data together with the Human Protein Atlas," says Szantner with a grin. "We're actually about to publish the first scientific article on Project Discovery."

The second phase of Project Discovery launches later this month. Taking inspiration from the game's intergalactic setting, researchers are recruiting Eve's space-loving community to discover new planets. Teaming up with both Reykjavik and Geneva Universities, Eve’s latest mini-game tasks players with analysing astronomical data recorded by the now defunct COROT space observatory. Players are provided with the luminosity curves of stars. Identifying a change in a star's brightness nets them an in-game reward while also potentially indicating to scientists that an undiscovered planet has passed in front of the star.

Listing image by CCP