We created), a citizen science activity that is seamlessly integrated within a popular commercial video game played by tens of millions of gamers. This integration is facilitated by a novel game-first design of citizen science games, in which the game design aspect has the highest priority, and a suitable task is then mapped to the game design.crowdsources a multiple alignment task of 1 million 16S ribosomal RNA sequences obtained from human microbiome studies.
This approach results in massive gains in public participation without sacrificing the relevance of the collected answers. More importantly, it provides access to new human computation resources capable of executing complex computational tasks on large scientific datasets, which would otherwise be unfeasible with classical CSGs.is designed to improve a reference multiple alignment of 1 million 16S ribosomal RNA sequences from The Microsetta Initiative’s American Gut Project gameplay.
To estimate the quality of such mapping, we report the proportion of non-gap nucleotides that cannot be mapped to the structure , the most common response that we received was enthusiasm and curiosity about science. Although quantifying this attitude would be its own study and, thus, left for future work, our experience in this project leads us to think that player engagement was driven by a combination of game-first design and genuine interest in science from the public.