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How Online Video Games Could Change the World

FoldIt is an online game in which players try to fold proteins into the functional forms.
foldit.wikia.com

Americans spend billions - in both dollars and hours - on video games each year. What if all that time and money produced knowledge that could benefit humanity?

Here’s today’s mindblowing factoid: It’s estimated that globally, people spend 200 million minutes - more than 3 million hours – each day playing Angry Birds. Read that again, if you need to.

When this figure was first released in 2011, The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal calculated that if even 5% of that playing happened during work hours, it could add up to $1.5 billion dollars worth of lost productivity. Here’s his math, if you care to double-check:

Credit www.theatlantic.com

The point here isn’t to bash Angry Birds or the people who play it. The point is that we love games and will spend immense amounts of time working through challenges, if they’re presented in the right way. And that could be a good thing – a transformatively good thing, if you ask Adrien Treuille.

Treuille has a boyish face and a giggle that belies his intelligence and ambitious ideas. Treuille has always loved games, and has been inventing them since he was a kid. But even he didn’t foresee the central role games would play in his early career.

While Treuille was in graduate school, he and his advisor were approached by scientists working on a problem that supercomputers have yet to crack – how proteins fold into the shapes necessary for them to function. Treuille says he wasn’t immediately sold on the collaboration. Until …

Credit Carnegie Mellon University
Adrien Treuille

“He said, actually, in passing, ‘or we could turn the whole thing into a game,’” recalls Treuille. “And the moment he said that, I knew, I was like ‘that’s what I want to do.’”

Treuille says he rearranged his life, cancelling plans for a postdoctoral position at MIT and dedicating himself to “making that game a reality.”

The result was FoldIt, an online game that launched in 2008. In six years, the FoldIt community has generated the findings for nearly as many scientific publications. In 2011, FoldIt players took just three weeks to figure out the structure of an enzyme involved in propagation of HIV – a puzzle that had stumped scientists for years.

Treuille has since created another game, EteRNA, that challenges players to develop RNA molecules that they think will fold into certain shapes. When they get good enough at the game, players can actually have researchers synthesize the molecules and test whether they do what they expect.

As important as these games, and others of the sort, could be for science, Treuille says that’s just the beginning of what crowdsourced games could do.

“We are, in a sense, sitting on a vast amount of productivity and increased economic activity,” says Treuille, “scientific and otherwise.”

Communities like those Treuille has built present an alternative to the corporations and institutions that are currently the building blocks of our economic and political systems. It’s just a matter of identifying the problems, then creating a fun and rewarding game to solve them.

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