It might seem like an unusual approach to squeeze a scientific analysis project into a fast-paced looter-shooter like Borderlands 3. An almost limitless human computation engine That familiarity is by design, as the format ideally fits the microbiome data set and the way it needs to be analyzed. Mario, which also involve matching colors and shapes.
Pitchford compared the minigame to familiar titles like Tetris and Dr. “So the idea of leaving behind the main objectives for a minute and going off on a tangent because something is interesting or fun is already a huge part of Borderlands.” “ Borderlands is a huge and varied universe that has so many different things that players can do and experience,” he said. Rather, it’s integrated into the world some players may not even realize they’re working to further science. The minigame isn’t presented as a citizen science add-on to the main game. Some of the rewards offered for playing Borderlands Science can temporarily carry over and help the players in the main Borderlands 3 game, while others are cosmetic upgrades that players can proudly wear to show off their contributions to the science minigame. So it has its own rules, its own rewards, and its own score.” The designers and artists came up with this notion of: What if onboard the hero’s home base, somebody brings in an arcade cabinet? And it’s there as part of the fiction. “It’s basically an arcade game,” Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford said. By matching sequences, players identify errors within the dataset. Players work on small chunks of data by matching up colored tiles to form rows. But they are filled with errors leftover from the automated computer analysis. There are millions of DNA sequences to analyze in the human gut microbiome dataset, and each sequence is 150 nucleotides long. Turning the task into a minigame makes it far more engaging, and embedding that minigame within an already popular game like Borderlands 3 means more people will access it and more people will play, generating more research data, Szantner said. But most people don’t want to sit down and sort through a pile of dry, scientific data. That’s why getting humans to do microbiome classification work is so helpful. The classifying of microbes is a somewhat ambiguous task and requires making judgment calls. Humans, on the other hand, are very skilled at making quick, rough estimations of similarity which produce near-optimal results. While computers are extremely good at some classifying tasks, they are not so good at recognizing “near enough” matches. Once researchers have collected samples from thousands of sources, someone needs to look at the DNA of each different microbe and decide whether it is the same or a similar species to another microbe, in order to classify it. One important but tedious task for microbiome research is classifying the many different types of microbes into genetically similar groupings. It has even been linked to neurodevelopmental conditions like autism and psychological disorders like anxiety. And when the microbiome goes wrong, it can contribute to diseases like arthritis, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia.
The microbiome has been identified as playing an important role in all sorts of bodily functions, from supporting the immune system to regulating hormone levels, and is known to contribute to health conditions like obesity. There are so many microbes in our systems that they even outnumber our bodies’ own cells, which has led some experts to argue that we are best described not as purely human but as a co-dependent host to these microbes. Together, these microbes from the microbiome, the term for the sum total of all the genetic material from the various microbes in the body.Īlthough we normally think of organisms like bacteria and viruses as dangerous to our health, only some of the wide variety of microorganisms we host are harmful. Within the human body, there is a huge abundance of microorganisms of many different types and species. By solving the puzzles, players help microbiome researchers by sorting through their data sets and analyzing them more efficiently than a computer could.ĭigital Trends spoke with Randy Pitchford, CEO of Borderlands 3 developers Gearbox, and Attila Szantner, co-founder of the Massively Multiplayer Online Science project which connects scientists and game developers, about what players can earn from playing Borderlands Science - and what they may give back to the world as they do so. Players solve puzzles as part of the minigame by connecting colored shapes into blocks of four.