Project Discovery scientists on EVE Online players’ contributions

EVE Online recently launched Phase Four of Project Discovery, its citizen science initiative which engages its players in data and research. To date, players have contributed hundreds of years’ worth of research data by helping with the project, the previous phases of which have included COVID-19 research. The current phase pits gamers against cancer — or more specifically, allows them to contribute to cancer research.

Project Discovery’s four phases have each involved research about (respectively) proteins in human cells, exoplanet discovery, COVID-19 research and now cancer research. Players who access the Project Discovery are given data to analyze in the form of a minigame that rewards them with in-game currency and items. The data, as the researchers note, requires human brainpower to solve — gamers aren’t doing the work of a machine.

GamesBeat spoke with several people involved in Project Discovery’s inception and launch within the game. Among them was Attila Szantner, CEO of Massively Multiplayer Online Science, who was credited by the others with the original idea. He told us, “What we’ve proven, or what’s clearly visible in Project Discovery, that the players solve the engagement problem in citizen science, and they provide massive amount of high-quality data sets for researchers. But also, it’s important to know that citizen science is an amazing tool for talking about science.”

Bergur Finnbogason, EVE Online’s creative director, also told us, “We set up some incentives, some in-game rewards, some in-game narratives for players to follow. We found that, after a few months, that there were a lot of players who play just for the rewards, but there are also a lot of people that played it for kind of the pride of participating, of doing something and giving back … . There was also a lot of discussion, even outside product discovery, where people are actually debating the data points. And these are not scientists. These are just people that have general interest in what we’re doing.”

So how exactly are gamers helping?

Dr. Ryan Brinkman, Distinguished Scientist at BC Cancer Agency and University of British Columbia, told GamesBeat a bit more about what players are doing when they participate in Project Discovery’s mini-games. “The last two phases involved gamers looking at flow cytometry data. Anything to do with your immune system, flow cytometry is the technology that looks at that. What the players are looking for is these different cell types inside the blood.”

The X-factor that gamers contribute, according to Dr. Brinkman, is their numbers. “The question everybody has is, can gamers do what scientists are doing? We had the scientists sit down and play the game that the players were playing day in, day out, and we told them to analyze the data as best they could. And then we compared those scientists to the hundreds and hundreds of gamers that are analyzing the same plot. This is where we able to leverage that because unlike having one scientist looking at the one plot, we have 500 players look at that one plot. We developed some bioinformatics math technologies to take those 500 players and tease out what we believe are the best solutions. When we compare those best solutions to what the scientists did … the gamers did better. That’s really why the gamers do better, because there are more of them.”

Jerome Waldispuhl, Associate Professor of Computer Science at McGill University, added, “Project Discovery is about trying to empower players by allowing them to contribute to science. But what’s also unique about it is that it shows that games are an essential tool in part of how we should do science in the future … . This community is really contributing to changing society by basically bringing this collective force to infuse science in society through a digital game. And I think that should drastically change the perception that everyone has about what games bring to the world nowadays.”