CCP Games and MMOS has announced a new EVE Online minigame that will help with the not-so-mini task of mapping proteins for the Human Protein Atlas, a scientific database that documents benign and cancerous proteins.
To stay consistent with the game’s aesthetic, EVE Online will only use the immunofluorescently stained subcellular proteins for its minigames. The bright staining on these proteins is reminiscent of colorful nebulae images taken by Hubble.
Though CCP hasn’t announced what in-game benefits the minigame may have, the objective is simple: players will identify protein links in over 250,000 images total, starting with simple links and leveling up to more complicated images.
- Statement made by Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS)
Pattern recognition is still something that humans do reliably better than computers, so the 13 million images remaining will take countless man hours to complete. Players of EVE Online will help thousands of researchers and millions, if not billions, of patients. Having a complete database would be an enormous boon to modern medicine, and we’ll have MMO players, in part, to thank.
Image source: proteinatlas.org
