They know all about saving fictional worlds, but gamers are now being called upon by researchers to lend a hand in one of humankind's biggest crises--the Covid-19 pandemic. So far, they have risen to the occasion and delivered the equivalent of 471 years of work. In the multiplayer space opera EVE Online, a mini-game called Project Discovery doubles as a citizen science platform, studying the human immune system's response to the novel coronavirus. Participants take on data analysis through gameplay that helps researchers isolate specific patterns as predictors of disease severity. The project is a collaboration with McGill University, the British Columbia Cancer Research Centre, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

The advances were reported by a collaboration between KTH Royal Institute of Technology, CCP Games and Massively Multiplayer Online Science. In a study published in the September issue of Nature Biotechnology, the researchers found that gamers, or "citizen scientists," helped boost the AI system used for predicting protein localization on a subcellular level. The combination of crowdsourcing and AI led to improved classification of subcellular protein patterns and the first-time identification of 10 new members of the family of cellular structures known as "Rods & Rings," says Emma Lundberg, a researcher from KTH who leads the Cell Atlas, part of the Human Protein Atlas, at the Science for Life joint research center. Lundberg says the data is being actively integrated into the publicly-available Human Protein Atlas database and will be a resource for researchers worldwide who are working towards a greater understanding of human cells, proteins and disease development. The researchers partnered with Massively Multiplayer Online Science and CCP Games to integrate analysis of protein localization from the Human Protein Atlas Cell Atlas images directly into EVE Online, a popular massively multiplayer online game.

If you enjoy navigating distant galaxies, leading intergalactic alliances and fighting space pirates, you might want to take on another challenge: discovering real planets. The space-based online game EVE Online, which bills itself as "the world's largest living work of science fiction", is delving into science fact by asking players to help search for planets outside our solar system. Details of the citizen science challenge, which is part of an initiative called Project Discovery, emerged at the game's annual Fanfest event in Reykjavik, Iceland, last week. A mini-game launching later this year within the EVE universe will present players with data from the now defunct COROT space observatory, which launched in 2006. They will be looking at luminosity curves, representing the change in a star's brightness as a planet passes in front of it.

On a warm evening in 2014, Attila Szantner, a Hungarian Web entrepreneur, and his friend Bernard Revaz, a Swiss physics researcher, sat on a balcony in Geneva and discussed the perils of video games. The medium's greatest threat, they concluded, is not that it turns people into vicious killers, or that it dulls their communication skills, or that it sunders their minds from reality. No, the problem is that, in providing players with a sense of accomplishment, games may distract our species from genuine achievement. Who hasn't felt a house-proud throb of satisfaction at clearing a clutter of Tetris blocks or landing a rocket ship on the moon after centuries of effort in Civilization? Like crosswords and pornography, these activities are both alluring and vacuous: they do little to meet life's challenges on this side of the screen. But it occurred to Szantner and Revaz that the tremendous amount of time and energy that people put into games could be co-opted in the name of human progress.