by When Borderlands Science was announced back in 2020 I thought it was a bit silly. Science? In my Borderlands? It was less likely than Dr. Mayim Bialik made me think. But it turns out that I’m the old fool, as McGill University, the institution that led the project, says the project has indeed been a resounding success “that will significantly advance our knowledge of the microbiome and which will improve on the AI programs that will. be used to carry out this work in the future.”
Science in Borderlands doesn’t happen through the regular game, but through the Borderlands Science minigame embedded in Borderlands 3. That’s what fueled my suspicions about the whole thing. Borderlands is all about shooting endless truckloads – how many players are going to give up on that to put time into a non-violent mini-game?
About 4.5 million of them, as it happens. “These players have helped trace the evolutionary relationships of more than a million different types of bacteria that live in the human gut, some of which play a critical role in our health,” McGill said in a press release. “This information represents an exponential increase in what we have discovered about the microbiome to date. By aligning rows of tiles representing the genetic building blocks of different microbes, humans have been able to tackle tasks that even the best computer algorithms have which already exists. Could not be resolved yet.”
With the project now safely completed, it seems McGill can now admit he was a little unsure about the whole thing too.
“We didn’t know if players of a popular game like Borderlands 3 would be interested or if the results would be good enough to improve what was already known about microbial evolution,” said Jérôme Waldipühl, associate professor in McGill School of Computing. Science and senior author on the study, published today in Nature. “But the results surprised us. In half a day, Borderlands Science players collected five times more data on microbial DNA sequences than our earlier game, Phylo, collected over a 10-year period.”
That’s the other interesting part of the study: Borderlands Science showed that citizen science projects like this can be overwhelming when integrated into games in ways that don’t draw, to use the scientific term. The paper in Nature says that a typical “citizen science game” that would reach 500,000 players – but a fraction of the number Borderlands Science reached – is a “huge success” mainly because it’s hard to get people to play games specifically in the name of science. hard work
For example, Phylo “struggled to keep players engaged for more than a few puzzles,” with users completing an average of 5.7 tasks, with a median of two. Frontier Science players completed an average of 35 tasks, with a median of 12.
The downside of that approach is that the increased focus on the “game” part of the project inevitably dilutes the “science” side. McGill said he “pushed the lid on gambling” in Frontier Science and, as expected, the “average scientific contribution” of one result was much lower than in Phylo. But “the ultra-gamification of BLS resulted in much higher player engagement and retention than in Phylo, which strongly mitigates that disadvantage.”
The game-heavy approach had other benefits as well. McGill said the most common response to Borderlands Science from gamers was “enthusiasm and curiosity about science,” and while that’s hard to quantify, the school said it believes the “first game design” was a key driver of the enthusiasm and for that participation.
“Furthermore, beyond the optimization of the trade-off described above, the inherent benefits of participating in a citizen science initiative, such as improvements in scientific literacy and increased community connectivity with the scientific world, further warrant exploration of the additional gaming region of. that trade,” McGill said. “To reach more participants is a valid objective in itself.”
As for what is being done with all the data coming out of Borderlands Science, Rob Knight from the Department of Pediatrics, Bioengineering, and Computer Science & Engineering at the University of California San Diego said that researchers hope specific types of microbes associated with diet, aging, and various types of disease. “Because evolution is a great guide to function, having a better tree connecting our microbes together gives us a more accurate picture of what they’re doing inside and around us,” Knight said.
“We have 4.5 million people here who have contributed to science. In a way, this result is also theirs and they should be proud of it,” said Waldipühl. “It shows that we can overcome the fear or misconceptions that members of the public may have about science and start building a community that works together to advance knowledge.”
The paper has been published, but the Borderlands Science project is still ongoing: A Gearbox representative confirmed that researchers are still collecting data provided by gamers.
