The Zooniverse citizen science web portal has engaged nearly a million volunteers in citizen science, beginning with morphology classification of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and extending to numerous other areas. NASA's ClickWorkers (2000) was an effort to classify large image data sets of moon craters and attracted over 100,000 online volunteers ( 35). A new kind of citizen science, involving the Internet-scale classification of images, was pioneered in the 2000s in the astronomy community ( 12, 15, 35). The development of new technologies, particularly the Internet, allowed these projects to achieve even larger scales ( 32– 34). Milestones of citizen science include the North American Bird Phenology Program (1890–1970) ( 7), the Audubon Christmas Bird Count (1900–present) ( 30), and the Continuous Plankton Recorder (1931–present) ( 31), which have all leveraged volunteer efforts to track natural phenomena over large geographical areas and long time frames-across continents and decades. Projects that reach out to nonexpert volunteers to carry out biological research extend back to at least the nineteenth century. In this section, we briefly review how citizen science, crowdsourcing, and video games set critical precedents for SDGs ( Figure 1). SDGs emerged from several prior approaches to engage large communities. After this overview, we then identify new areas of research that might be addressed in the next generation of SDGs.įigure 1 2. ROOTS OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY GAMES Here, we discuss the relationship between games and previous modes of scientific discovery, classify and critically evaluate the scientific potential of current SDGs, identify similarities across different game player communities, and outline best practices for creating SDGs. The successes of these and other projects on nontrivial research problems demonstrate that SDGs can deliver genuine scientific value. In recent years, the launch and release of publications from Foldit, Eterna, EyeWire, Phylo, and numerous other SDGs ( Figure 1) have provided answers to many of these questions. In 2010, the most basic questions on the scientific effectiveness, player communities, and costs of development of SDGs were unknown. Riedel-Kruse, who is designing platforms for playful interactions with living microbiology ( 6). Das, who has developed early SDGs ( 5), and I.H. This review emerged from discussions that began in 2010 between two of the authors-R. The field is quite new, with reviews so far primarily focusing on the promise of SDGs ( 1– 4) rather than critically evaluating their performance relative to prior Internet-scale volunteer initiatives, paid crowdsourcing initiatives, or computational approaches. Scientific discovery games (SDGs) bring together researchers looking for novel ways to approach unsolved problems with a global population of volunteers interested in contributing to scientific research but without the traditional means of doing so.
Games are an ancient medium for human creativity and exploration that have only recently been harnessed for biomedical research. Finally, we highlight connections to artificial intelligence, biological cloud laboratories, new game genres, science education, and open science that may drive the next generation of SDGs. We discuss emergent properties of player communities shared across different projects, including the diversity of communities and the extraordinary contributions of some volunteers, such as paper writing. We find compelling results and technical innovations arising in problem-oriented games such as Foldit and Eterna and in data-oriented games such as EyeWire and Project Discovery. After describing the origins of this novel research approach, we review the scientific output of SDGs across molecular modeling, sequence alignment, neuroscience, pathology, cellular biology, genomics, and human cognition. Over the past decade, scientific discovery games (SDGs) have emerged as a viable approach for biomedical research, engaging hundreds of thousands of volunteer players and resulting in numerous scientific publications.