Addictive online puzzle game is turning players into citizen scientists

THREE superplayers of an addictive online puzzle game have done something that Stanford University Medical School believes is unprecedented: They’ve become the first authors on a paper published in a peerreviewed scientific journal based on their discoveries in playing the large-scale, online video game EteRNA. The group of three gamers learned about their subject — the “folding” of RNA into different structures — by playing the game itself.

Jeffery Anderson-Lee, a co-author on the paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology, said his formal training in biochem amounts to a high school biology class and a chemistry course as an undergrad. He’s a computer scientist by training. He’s also one of the more advanced players of EteRNA, a citizen science game developed to explore the rules governing how different shapes are formed.

“It’s a very fun game to play,” Anderson-Lee, a computer scientist who works in IT, said. “Initially, when you’re not that skilled in the bio sciences and whatnot, you get points and advance quickly.”

Introductory levels feature basic instructions, and build gradually as players beat each early level of the game. There’s a cheerful, triumphant animation that plays at the completion of each level, which helps to make the whole thing feel fun. “As you move on,” he added, “you learn about the science, and that has its own rewards.”