Scientific Discovery Games: Anyone Can Play and Contribute to Solving the Hardest Questions in Science
By Taylor Kubota
Stanford University researchers Rhiju Das and Ingmar Riedel-Kruse like to play games. Specifically, they are champions of scientific discovery games – games that are designed so that anyone can play and, in doing so, contribute to solving the hardest questions in science.

Rhiju Das, left, and Ingmar Riedel-Kruse developed a scientific discovery game and encourage people to use such games to expand biomedical research. (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)
“There’s this paradigm of scientific discovery games and it may sound silly or far-fetched, but in the last 10 years it’s led to important scientific discoveries in several different disciplines,” Das said. “We want more people to play the games, more people to create these games, and more people to realize that this is a legitimate mode of discovery.”
Both Das and Riedel-Kruse have developed their own games. Das, an associate professor of biochemistry, developed Eterna, an online puzzle game where players design molecules for RNA-based medicines. Eterna has engaged over 200,000 players. These non-experts have begun writing their own peer-reviewed manuscripts and have organized their own yearly Eternacon convention at Stanford.
Riedel-Kruse focuses on educational games. In this realm, he has developed biotic games, where people can playfully interact with living cells, such as one game where people play soccer with light-seeking microbes.
As part of a review they wrote for the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science, published July 22, they estimate about a dozen of these games have been developed in the last decade.
“These games layer a playful aspect on top of the science, which adds motivation and can be educational,” said Riedel-Kruse, who was an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford when he did the work. “It’s also a window into how science really works – professional scientists are curious and they play around with ideas.” Riedel-Kruse recently joined the faculty at the University of Arizona.
In their review, Das and Riedel-Kruse traced the origins of scientific discovery games back to the 1800s to early bird survey efforts that relied on volunteers, a category of science now called citizen science. They also credit online crowdsourced work – exemplified by Wikipedia and Amazon Mechanical Turk – and video games with setting the stage for scientific discovery games.
Most experts consider Foldit the first scientific discovery game. This online puzzle game, developed by researchers at the University of Washington in 2008, challenges players to fold proteins as perfectly as possible, given specific rules and tools. As with many of these games, it engages players to join into a supercomputer running multiple puzzles at once – but with the advantage that they have the nuanced reasoning skills and adaptability of humans. The researchers behind Foldit study high-scoring solutions to see if players have created novel protein structures. In 2011, players resolved the structure of an enzyme involved in the reproduction of an HIV-like retrovirus for the first time.
Along the same lines, both Das and Riedel-Kruse are working on translating skilled game play into laboratory success. With Eterna, Das and his lab tested player-generated solutions in test tubes and used those results to both further their research and reward players in the game. In the future, Das hopes they can run these laboratory experiments not just in test tubes but with living cells, directed by Eterna players. Riedel-Kruse has done work on robotic biology labs controlled remotely online and sees the possibility of integrating such systems to enable real-time laboratory scientific discovery games. He is also working on ways to modify his biotic games for online play.
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