WeBlogScience

Thanks to a friend, I recently discovered two brilliant games that are really harnessing the potential of crowdsourced science and multiplayer online  communities.

Signtific lab takes a big question (What will happen in the future?) and shuffles it with a simple card game and your imagination. Each ‘trial’ focuses on a simple question (the last one was about the merging of real life and digital life, the current one asks “What will you do when space is as cheap and accessible as the Web is today?”).

You  summarise your idea in a short Twitter-style 140 character bites to play in as a card. These can be positive or negative scenarios, and you either play a new idea yourself or follow up on others cards, agreeing, disagreeing or adapting the idea to keep the momentum going. You get points for every card you play, but the real trick is to interact with the ideas of others and kick-off a chain reaction of ideas and discussion; the longer the chain, the more points you get.

Ideas range from the genius out-of-the-box thinking (nano-genetics breeds new opportunities for government monitoring: pets monitor you) to the smart take on an everyday aspect of life (The Pro Evolution Soccer game goes to the next level, players control real-life footballers). You compete and collaborate (much like science really) against people from all over the world.

Through this, the developers hope to generate ideas and discussion that government research institutes, NGOs and scientists might follow up on, and get a feel for where the public thinks science and technology is going. It’s a simple and brilliant idea, putting you in the middle of a fascinating conversation and prompting you to engage  your imagination  (a rare thing in the modern digital age of passive information overload).

The second game, Foldit is a different concept, but like Galaxyzoo, it’s outsourcing scientific problems to the net to conduct large scale experiments on human thinking, and feeding that into real work figuring out molecular structures.

At this point I’m going to be very lazy and defer to Maggie Koerth-Baker, who’s already written an excellent description over on BoingBoing:

After playing a series of practice challenges that teach the rules–basically the laws of physics as applied to protein structure–players are then set on tasks that use their natural 3-D problem solving skills to pin down the best structures for certain proteins. The hitch: Game developers don’t know what the “best” answer is, so you can’t get any hints. And points are awarded not by how close you’re getting to the known solution, but by how much energy would be needed to hold a real-life protein in the shape you’ve created. The real challenge comes from competing against other players to make the highest-point-collecting version of a specific protein.

Researchers hope to use the game play to make better protein structure prediction software, based on gamers’ strategies; to have players figure out the mysteries of proteins that don’t yet have a known structure; and to create challenges that let players design new proteins that could fill some real-world needs—like disabling a specific virus.

It’s kind of like Tetris, but your win is also a win for science. An excellent way to use those idle times at work you would otherwise be spending on Facebook