What if your game controller turned you into a researcher without you even knowing it?

Beyond simple entertainment

We often have this idealized image of video games: a purely entertaining pastime, or even a waste of time for some. However, behind the fantastical worlds that sometimes seem to make no sense, there is a much more serious reality. Did you know that this industry, which now generates more than $100 billion a year, has become an unexpected but valuable ally for science?

Whether it’s to study our behavior, test new technologies, or train artificial intelligence, video games have left the living room and entered the laboratory. Does this idea seem absurd to you? Not really. After all, science and gaming are based on the same fundamental principle: trial and error. We try, we fail, we try again until we understand. This is what we call experimentation.

A training ground for humans and machines

How does it work in practice? First, there is learning by doing. It is well known that we learn better by doing than by listening passively. Video games, thanks to their interactivity, are powerful educational tools. Take the famous FIFA: it allows players to learn the subtleties of soccer. Other more fast-paced titles, such as the strategy game Call of Duty Warzone, challenge and hone players’ precision, skill, and anticipation.

But that’s not all. Video games push technology to its limits. They are a formidable driving force for computer graphics—remember the French pioneer Alone in the Dark and its revolutionary 3D graphics in 1992. Today, the challenge is artificial intelligence (AI). For AI, beating a human is a monumental puzzle. Imagine: the best pro players can perform up to 300 actions per minute!

Yet machines are making progress. In 2019, the AlphaStar system developed by DeepMind achieved the feat of ranking among the top 0.2% of players worldwide on the complex Starcraft 2. This achievement is then used to solve real-world problems.

When gamers become research assistants

This is where it gets fascinating: sometimes, it’s the collective intelligence of the players that breaks the deadlock. You may have heard of Foldit. This game involves solving protein folding puzzles. Where computers failed, players succeeded in 2011 in modeling the structure of the M-PMV enzyme. More recently, this platform has even been mobilized in the fight against Covid-19.

Even space is not immune to this phenomenon. In 2017, publisher CCP Games launched a somewhat crazy project in its massively multiplayer game EVE Online. In partnership with the universities of Reykjavik and Geneva, as well as astronomer Michel Mayor (discoverer of the first exoplanet, 51 Pegasi b, in 1995), they integrated a scientific mini-game called « Project Discovery. »

Their mission? To analyze data from the CoRoT space telescope, launched by CNES in 2006. Players had to spot anomalies in the light curves, which could be signs of exoplanets. These thousands of human eyes helped to do the groundwork for researchers at the University of Geneva. So, the next time you pick up your controller, remember that you may be contributing, in your own small way, to the next great scientific discovery. According to the source: science-et-vie.com Created by humans, assisted by AI.