Wouldn’t it be great if instead of playing gems or trolling general chat during your MMORPG downtime, you could be contributing to real-world science? And wouldn’t it be even better if MMO devs collaborated directly with scientists to make that all happen? That’s exactly what CCP is up to in EVE Online with its Project Discovery.
If you ever donated time to Galaxy Zoo, you’ll understand how this works: You play an ostensible minigame inside of EVE, hunting for patterns (or the lack thereof) in sets of images presented to you by the game. Of course, in this case the images are of human cells, and players are actually crowdsourcing some of the more mundane bits of science research for the Human Protein Atlas project — in exchange for a nifty EVE plotline and in-game rewards.
This week, CCP released two videos on the project — one an overview, one an in-character announcement — and both are below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXHV2MMZmQw
