

“The number in a given population can change according to, for example, disease of a drug and we can look for similar changes in groups of people (sick vs. “Drawing the polygon allows us to count how many are in that polygon,” Brinkman said. For example, at Rank 5, players earn the Biosecurity Response Team Mask and at Rank 650, they can earn the Marshal Biosecurity Responders Skin. Players earn set rewards when they reach specific ranks associated with the minigame. All they need to do is use a point-and-click system to draw polygons around the main mass of the clusters.

Players that play the COVID-19 Project Discovery minigame in EVE will see this 2D graph with multicolor dot cells. Pictured here are two clusters of cells that a player identified in the Project Discovery COVID-19 minigame within EVE Online, Photo Credit: CCP Games “It is placed on a 2D graph based on how much it expresses one of many different types of cell surface proteins that can be used to define the cell’s function.” “Each dot is a cell,” University of British Columbia medical genetics professor and distinguished scientist of BC Cancer, Ryan Brinkman, said. Some are yellow, some are red, some are green, and so on. What players are doing when they play the associated minigame is looking at a cluster of multicolor dots. If you were to log on to EVE to take part in this COVID-19 project, you’d find that it’s extremely well-implemented into the game. “We’ve been running it for almost a year, or exactly a year now, and yeah, it’s super exciting and it’s really turned into a wonderful project.” “Our latest installment is this COVID-19 project,” Finnbogason said.

This helped scientists discover exoplanets in space. Similar to the COVID-19 minigame, EVE players played an in-game minigame to pour through luminosity curve datasets, which represented the brightness of stars as planets passed by them. The first Project Discovery project in EVE was centered on identifying proteins in human cells and the second Project Discovery project was centered on the discovery of real exoplanets or distant planets outside of our solar system. If the game offered a science project to help real-world scientists, players would be dedicated to it. That's where the idea of placing one of these projects in an MMO - a genre with communities of people who do the very opposite of trying something once and never touching it again - was born.įinnbogason and Szantner said the idea came to them to merge citizen science projects while trying to get input from actual humans with EVE. Seeing that people were so quick to drop these projects, the parties involved devised a way to merge citizen science projects with something that would make people want to stick around. these fantastic projects would happen… with super worthy causes… but people would come in, try it once, and then never come back.” “He started seeing this pattern in these projects where basically.

“This is a project that was initially started by, or at least an idea from, a few years back where he was looking at citizen science projects around the world, all over the internet,” Finnbogason said. Speaking to IGN, EVE Online Creative Director, Bergur Finnbogason, explained how the project began. To date, 327,000 players have completed 1.37 million analysis tasks in-game, which has saved scientists 330.69 years worth of research into how the immune system responds to COVID-19. Over the past year, they’ve been helping scientists learn more about COVID-19. Through a citizen science project called Project Discovery, players are able to help scientists in the real world solve problems that need human input, such as helping scientists discover new planets.
