Take a look at how EVE Online made a game mechanic out of scientific research

You doubtlessly have a pretty clear idea of what goes on in EVE Online at this point. Players mine resources, build ships, screw one another out of money and resources, and complete scientific research projects as a group. If you didn’t know about that last one, though, perhaps you’d like to take a look at how the game integrated research work for the Human Protein Atlas into the game’s ongoing stories and got players to do a huge amount of scientific work while playing the game.

The short version, of course, is that this is exactly the way that crowd-sourced science can work, allowing lots of people to do the hard number crunching and producing results without taking up high-end research time. The article recounts previous attempts at crowdsourcing scientific work such as Folding@home, with CCP Games aiming to make the experience feel like satisfying gameplay without removing the scientific component. So it turns out that you weren’t just killing miners for their resources, you were doing so for science.

Or at least you would have been doing it for science if that had been part of the project. But the thought is still there.