

In the early 1950s, just as rock ‘n’ roll was hinting at social change, the first video games were quietly being designed in the form of technology demonstrations—and a scientist was behind it. In October 1958, Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist William Higinbotham created Tennis for Two. Despite graphics that are ridiculously primitive by today’s standards, it has been described as the first video game in history.

Higinbotham was inspired by the government research institution’s Donner Model 30 analog computer, which could simulate trajectories with wind resistance, and the game was designed for display at an annual public exhibition. Although his purpose in creating the game was rather academic, Tennis for Two turned out to be a hit at the three-day exhibition, with thousands of students lining up to see the game.

At first glance, today's video gamers and scientists might appear to be worlds apart. But starting with Tennis for Two, video games have quietly and consistently been within the purview of academic study. Each generation of gamers has seen new titles created at various research institutions in order to explore programming, human-computer interaction, and algorithms. Lesser-known chapters of history reveal these two worlds are not as far apart as you might think.

From Spacewar! to Foldit

After Tennis for Two's success in the late 1950, computing technology rapidly improved over the next few years. As computers became smaller and faster, more people obtained access to them. As a result, programmers began to create games for nonacademic purposes, leading up to 1962 and the “birth” of Spacewar!, the first digital computer game available outside a research institute and created solely for entertainment purposes.

During the rest of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, numerous computer games were created, and ambitious programmers saw a profitable industry rise as the audience for video games grew. Meanwhile, the separation of academia from the video game industry was becoming more and more apparent. With the release of Space Invaders in 1978 and the introduction of vector display technology a year later, a golden age of arcade video games began, one that would reach its peak with the release of Pac-Man in 1980.

In the 1990s, as advanced video game consoles entered the homes of hundreds of millions of people worldwide, the breach between the scientific/academic world and the video game industry appeared to be deeper than ever before, and possibly permanent.

Academics looked at video games and showed that they can improve a gamer’s creative thinking, teamwork skills, hand-eye coordination, problem solving, and memory (although numerous scholars have also focused on what they perceive as gaming’s negatives). But games didn’t have any apparent real-world usefulness for anyone but the gamer. That’s been changing in recent years, though, thanks to the release of online games that are not solely for entertainment purposes.

A key event driving the shift came in 2008 with the release of Foldit, a revolutionary online game that enables its players to contribute to significant scientific research. Foldit was developed as part of an experimental research project conducted by the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science, in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry. The Foldit website was crystal clear about the game’s purpose:

Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans’ puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins. Since proteins are part of so many diseases, they can also be part of the cure. Players can design brand-new proteins that could help prevent or treat important diseases.

In a virtual contest that pitted gamers against the best-known computer program designed for the task, gamers didn’t fail to impress. Only two years after Foldit’s release, more than 57,000 players were already providing useful results that matched or outperformed algorithmically computed solutions. In 2011, a team of Foldit gamers needed just 10 days to figure out the detailed molecular structure of an enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys, a structure that had eluded experts for more than a decade.

In January 2012, Foldit gamers would accomplish the first crowdsourced redesign of a protein, an enzyme that catalyzed a reaction widely used in synthetic chemistry to synthesize everything from drugs to pesticides. Enzymes that catalyze Diels-Alder reactions have been elusive, so the achievement of Foldit gamers is significant.

An early version of that enzyme was made by a group of scientists including David Baker, a Ph.D. and protein research scientist at the University of Washington and founder of the Foldit project. They computationally designed the enzyme from scratch but soon discovered its potency wasn’t all they’d hoped for. Foldit players re-engineered the enzyme by adding 13 amino acids, increasing its activity by more than 18 times. How did they manage such an incredible feat? Thanks to Foldit’s gameplay, players could explore more radical changes to the protein than typical algorithms allow.

As Baker continued to look for useful targets to set Foldit players on, other researchers started to tap into the love some players have for games that solve complex scientific puzzles, people who would never have access to a lab under normal circumstances.

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