General Gaming Millions of Borderlands 3 players -- believe it or not -- helped McGill University advance real-world biomedical research

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Borderlands 3 community scores a big win for science: 'These players have helped trace the evolutionary relationships of more than a million different kinds of bacteria that live in the human gut' | PC Gamer

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Launched in 2020, the Borderlands Science project was a major success.

 

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When Borderlands Science was announced back in 2020 I thought it all sounded a little silly. Science? In my Borderlands? It struck me as a lot less likely than Dr. Mayim Bialik seemed to think. But it turns out that I was the silly one all along, because McGill University, the institution leading the project, says the project was in fact a massive success that will "substantially advance our knowledge of the microbiome and improve on the AI programs that will be used to carry out this work in future."

 

Science in Borderlands does not occur through the usual gameplay, but rather by way of the Borderlands Science minigame embedded in Borderlands 3. That's what really drove my doubts about the whole thing. Borderlands is all about shooting endless truckloads of dudes—how many players are going to step away from that to put time into a non-violent minigame?

 

Roughly 4.5 million of them, as it turns out. "These players have helped trace the evolutionary relationships of more than a million different kinds of bacteria that live in the human gut, some of which play a crucial role in our health," McGill said in a press release. "This information represents an exponential increase in what we have discovered about the microbiome up till now. By aligning rows of tiles which represent the genetic building blocks of different microbes, humans have been able to take on tasks that even the best existing computer algorithms have been unable to solve yet."

 

 

Millions of gamers advance biomedical research

WWW.MCGILL.CA

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Leveraging gamers and video game technology can dramatically boost scientific research according to a new study published today in Nature Biotechnology. 4.5 million gamers around the world have

 

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4.5 million gamers around the world have advanced medical science by helping to reconstruct microbial evolutionary histories using a minigame included inside the critically and commercially successful video game, Borderlands 3. Their playing has led to a significantly refined estimate of the relationships of microbes in the human gut. The results of this collaboration will both substantially advance our knowledge of the microbiome and improve on the AI programs that will be used to carry out this work in future.

 

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Tracing the evolutionary relationships of bacteria

 

By playing Borderlands Science, a mini-game within the looter-shooter video game Borderlands 3, these players have helped trace the evolutionary relationships of more than a million different kinds of bacteria that live in the human gut, some of which play a crucial role in our health. This information represents an exponential increase in what we have discovered about the microbiome up till now. By aligning rows of tiles which represent the genetic building blocks of different microbes, humans have been able to take on tasks that even the best existing computer algorithms have been unable to solve yet.

 

The project was led by McGill University researchers, developed in collaboration with Gearbox Entertainment Company, an award-winning interactive entertainment company, and Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS), a Swiss IT company connecting scientists to video games), and supported by the expertise and genomic material from the Microsetta Initiative led by Rob Knight from the Departments of Pediatrics, Bioengineering, and Computer Science & Engineering at the University of California San Diego.

 

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Humans improve on existing algorithms and lay groundwork for the future

 

Not only have the gamers improved on the results produced by the existing programs used to analyze DNA sequences, but they are also helping lay the groundwork for improved AI programs that can be used in future.

 

“We didn’t know whether the players of a popular game like Borderlands 3 would be interested or whether the results would be good enough to improve on what was already known about microbial evolution. But we’ve been amazed by the results.” says Jérôme Waldispühl, an associate professor in McGill’s School of Computer Science and senior author on the paper published today. “In half a day, the Borderlands Science players collected five times more data about microbial DNA sequences than our earlier game, Phylo, had collected over a 10-year period.”

 

 

[Mr.Vic20]

The question now is, how much credit will Randy take for this?! 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

6 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

The question now is, how much credit will Randy take for this?! 

 

From his Xwitter account:

 

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Published in peer reviewed Nature Biotechnology, Borderlands Science is the backbone for "Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science within a mass-market videogame" - this is meaningful stuff and can be used as a go-to reference to demonstrate how video games are making the world better: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02175-6

[Xbob42]

The only good thing any Borderland fan has ever done. Bravo!

[Slug]

So do we get like a co-author credit on the study or....?

[Keyser_Soze]

9 minutes ago, Slug said:

So do we get like a co-author credit on the study or....?

 

How does 10 shift codes sound?

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

Kind of reminds me when a whole lot of PS3 owners left their PS3 on running Folding at Home, myself included. This was obviously more involved in player participation, but still a neat way to crowd fund actual research.