IN TRANSIT
How players are searching for real exoplanets through EVE Online.
I’m squinting at a luminosity graph, scoping it out for possible signs of exoplanets. Technically I’m playing EVE Online, following assignments doled out by the NPC Professor Michel Mayor and earning in-game rewards. But the data comes from the University of Geneva, Michel Mayor is also a real astrophysicist, and the work I’m doing is contributing to the actual search for exoplanets. Project Discovery is a collaboration between EVE developer CCP Games and the University of Geneva, which is facilitated by a company called Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS). MMOS want to make it possible to integrate scientific research tasks into existing games, and thus use their playerbases to conduct research. It’s a form of citizen science.
Seeding research tasks into games taps into a volunteer workforce who can conduct types or volumes of analysis that aren’t possible with computers. One of the advantages of using games, say MMOS, is that a research project can take advantage of the game’s existing player retention systems to prevent high drop out rates after the first flush of curiosity passes.
This isn’t EVE’s first foray into citizen science. Project Discovery’s first iteration tasked the game’s players with classifying images from the Human Protein Atlas. It took the form of a minigame where players identified and categorized parts of subcellular structures.
In-game this was positioned as helping an NPC faction called the Sisters of EVE to research the DNA of another faction. As with the exoplanet research, one of the scientists from the real Human Protein Atlas—Emma Lundberg—was incorporated as an NPC.
strange new worlds
Players embraced the challenge and contributed millions of classifications. Some even did their own research on the subject or took a course Lundberg offered via EVE University. Project Discovery was also responsible for identifying new examples of proteins which localize to subcellular structures called Rods & Rings.
But while subcellular structures are interesting, exoplanets have an obvious affinity with the world and players of a space-themed MMO. In early July 2017, the second iteration of Project Discovery went live. In just two weeks players had submitted a staggering 13.2 million classifications. For perspective, MMOS notes that this total was “almost half of all the classifications submitted in the first Project Discovery over more than a year”.
This time players see a light curve graph from one of the 160,000 stars monitored by the CoRoT telescope. The graph shows a star’s luminosity over time. By looking for
points where the luminosity dips we can identify when an object such as a planet might be passing in front of that star and blocking some of the light. There are also tools to flag up whether those dips are happening at regular intervals (and thus suggest an object in orbit).
In the tutorial you’ll be presented with graphs where the transit behavior is already known. This allows players to learn the principles and lets the game begin assessing their accuracy. After this you’ll start seeing graphs from the dataset. In these instances submitting your work won’t give you a pass or fail, it’ll tell you how your verdict compares with the rest of the playerbase and what the consensus is.
Project Discovery has to find ways to continually assess accuracy amongst all these unknowns. For this CCP employs a tactic used in the first Project Discovery. It seeds gold standard data—data that has already been analyzed—amongst the tasks. When players submit a result for gold standard curves the game can measure their accuracy. If your accuracy falls below a threshold, you stop submitting data. That helps protect the research against unengaged players as well as bots.
There are a mixture of reward systems to keep players engaged. Some are videogamey systems—in-game currency for submissions, or awards for reaching a certain level. The exoplanet research also has in-game effects in terms of story: Analysing those curves has ‘revealed’ the entry points to pockets of space and time which form the basis of the game’s Into The Abyss expansion.
Doing it for the thrill
Other rewards are harder to quantify, like the excitement of being involved in actual scientific work. Sæmundur Hermannsson, a member of the Project Discovery team, believes EVE Online players are “simply motivated by the knowledge that they are directly helping real-life space exploration, and they realize that finding exoplanets is not a simple or a short journey”.
Hermannsson tells me that Project Discovery has now garnered over 80 million submissions from 149,000 players and boasts over 4,000 daily active users. “I honestly think that Project Discovery has knocked any expectations out of the park!” he adds.
Project Discovery is the most established of MMOS’s projects, but others are now in the works, including a collaboration with Gearbox Software—maker of Borderlands. MMOS cofounder Attila Szantner is looking forward to seeing how citizen science can be adapted to different types of gaming.
“We all know that EVE Online is a special game,” he says. “That is why I am very excited to see how Gearbox Software—in a completely different genre, with a different community and playerbase and different game dynamics—will incorporate these features. Although it will pose different challenges, I see no reasons why it wouldn’t work in their games as well.” Philippa Warr
In just two weeks players had submitted a staggering 13.2 million claSS IFICAT IONS