How Gamers Are Fighting AIDS (and Winning): Q+A

I haven't actually figured out how to play the puzzle game, Foldit yet, but since the announcement that players of the game cracked the elusive structure of one of enzymes key in the HIV virus—a giant step in AIDS research—the game's site has been pretty bogged down and frequently unusable until just recently. So I'm a total n00b, in other words.

The goal of the game is essentially to build protein structures, which is a natural puzzle, and you're doing it toward real-life goals, like mapping cancer proteins and the proteins involved with Alzheimers. And with AIDS. I emailed with one of the University of Washington researchers working on the project about just how far this sort of gaming can go, who plays it, and more.

Do you think that it's a different sort of gamer attracted to something like Foldit than your usual Xbox jock? Is there a large community out there devoted to science problem solving games like this?

Yes. It seems to gather a much wider audience, including folks that never liked games much, but were drawn to Foldit for its potential impact on science. We have grandmothers, 13 year olds that play with their parents, the unemployed, [a] seemingly large population of lawyers (perhaps it's more fun than the daily grind at work), etc.

Is there much precedence for this discovery? Assuming that there are similar things to Foldit out there for different problems, has there been a discovery like this before?

This is the first discovery of a longstanding problem that was resolved through a scientific discovery game. Perhaps more interestingly, the players who produced these discoveries learned all they needed to know about proteomics through Foldit game play. This means that the game is really creating domain-specific experts, and not just discoveries.

Along those same lines, is there something specific that stands as an inspiration for this sort of gamer/science collaboration?

Foldit players are inspired by the ability to make a difference and by the fact that they are creating a brand new way to do science. There was some considerable doubt by the scientific community that these methods could lead to significant discoveries, and I think players revel in surprising everyone.

Was there one person or team in particular that "won"?

The last player that improves the score officially wins, but they heavily rely on each others' advancements. We know for a fact that any individual almost never beats collaborative Foldit play.

Best for last: how fun can you make a game like this, that's doing actual science? There's a huge pool of untapped resources in gamers, in their brains and their machines, and it seems a question of how far into that pool can you get. What about making the science aspect less overt and sort of disguising tasks into gameplay?

Yes, that's the big question. Just making a fun game that keeps people for a long time is hard. Having the dual objective of fun and relevance to science is much, much harder. At the Center for Game Science we have developed specific iterative refinement methods that try to optimize both engagement and relevance. Over time the more people who play, the more our games improve on both measures.

One more. What do you think this says about the capabilities or computers versus those of people? Is this sort of symbiosis a stepping point, or do you think human/computer teamwork will remain vital as computers get exponentially more powerful?

We are primarily focusing on the symbiosis of humans and computers because there are lots of boring tedious parts of most tasks that computers can do better and cheaper than people. When it comes to complex problem solving ability, and especially creativity, human ability will remain unmatched for a very long time.

Reach this writer at michael@motherboard.tv.