When Borderlands Science was announced in 2020, I thought it all sounded a bit silly. science? In my Borderlands? It seemed much less likely to me than Dr. Mayim Bialik thought. But it turns out I was the stupid one all along, because McGill University, the institution leading the project, says the project is actually a huge success that will “significantly advance our knowledge of the microbiome and advance artificial intelligence programs that will be used to perform this work in the future.”
The science in Borderlands doesn’t happen through the usual gameplay, but rather through the Borderlands Science minigame built into Borderlands 3. This is what really raised my doubts about the whole thing. Borderlands is all about shooting endless trucks of dudes – how many players will step away from that to make time for 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 species of bacteria that live in the human gut, some of which play critical roles in our health,” McGill said in a press release. “This information represents an exponential increase in what we have discovered about the microbiome so far. By aligning rows of tiles that represent the genetic building blocks of different microbes, humans have been able to take on tasks that even the best existing computer algorithms have yet to solve.”
With the project now safely completed, McGill can obviously now admit that it was a little uncertain about the whole thing as well.
“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 is already known about microbial evolution,” said Jérôme Waldispühl, associate professor in McGill’s School of Computer Science and senior author of the study, published today in Nature. “But we were amazed by the results. In half a day, Borderlands Science players collected five times more data on microbial DNA sequences than our previous game, Phylo, had collected over a 10-year period.”
That’s the other interesting part of the study: Borderlands Science demonstrates that citizen science projects like this can have seriously big reach when integrated into games in ways that, to use the scientific term, are not bad. The paper in Nature says a typical “citizen science game” reaching 500,000 players – just a fraction of the number reached by Borderlands Science – would be a “huge success”, in large part because it’s hard to get people to play games specifically in the name of scientific endeavour.
Phylo, for example, “struggled to keep players engaged for more than a few puzzles” and had an average of 5.7 tasks completed by users and an average of two. Borderlands Science players completed an average of 35 tasks and an average of 12.
The downside of this approach is that the increased focus on the “play” of the project inevitably dilutes the “science” side. McGill said he has “pushed the limits of gamification” in Borderlands Science and, as expected, the “average scientific contribution” of a result is significantly lower than in Phylo. But “BLS’s ultra-gamification resulted in far greater player engagement and retention than in Phylo, which greatly alleviates this shortcoming.”
There were other added benefits to the game-heavy approach. McGill said the most common reaction to Borderlands Science from gamers “is enthusiasm and curiosity about science,” and while that’s hard to quantify, the school said it believes “design comes first in the game.” is a major driver of this enthusiasm and commitment.
“Furthermore, beyond the trade-off optimization described above, the inherent benefits of participating in a citizen science initiative, such as improvements in scientific literacy and increased public engagement with the scientific world, further justify exploring the additional region of gamification of this trade-off,” said McGill. “Reaching out to more participants is a valid goal in itself.”
(Image credit: Randy Pitchford (Twitter))
As for what to do with all the data coming out of Borderlands Science, Rob Knight of UC San Diego’s Departments of Pediatrics, Bioengineering and Computer Science and Engineering said the researchers hope to link specific types of microbes to diet , aging and various types of diseases. “Because evolution is a great guide to function, having a better tree connecting our microbes to each other gives us a more accurate picture of what they’re doing inside and around us,” Knight said.
“Here we have 4.5 million people contributing to science. In a way, this result is also theirs and they should be proud of it,” Valdispühl said. “This shows that we can combat the fear or misconceptions that members of the public may have about science and begin to build communities that work collectively to advance knowledge.”
