Gaming Cancer: How video games and citizen science can help cure the disease
By Jeff Yoshimi | Published: 2025-07-11 12:59:00 | Source: Health – Big Think
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Think of a player playing a game. Someone might be in a room near you right now. You hear periodic bouts of anger and joy. They’ve been at it for hours. These games may be easy to learn, but they are certainly not easy to win. As Atari founder Nolan Bushnell said, “The best games are easy to learn and hard to master.”
What keeps us glued to the gaming console for long hours in humans? One evolutionary answer: We are natural problem solvers. This same motivation still serves us today. For example, scientists spend years perfecting their fields, writing tedious grant proposals, cultivating cells for hours, and enduring decades of training. Their persistence leads to better medicine, better technology, and a better world.
Games are exploiting this evolving trend; They appeal to the ancient circuits in us that strive to know things. Game designers create a virtual embodiment of some kind of problem-solving situation—escaping an enemy, defeating an opponent, reaching the next level, or unlocking a skill—and make it easy and intuitive to start playing. They lure you with victories and easy progress. But as time goes by, it gets harder and harder, and in the end, to win, you have to walk a narrow path through the workspace, doing only the right things, in the right order, to achieve your goal.
These fascinating analogies can be put to surprisingly good use, as I argue in my book, Gaming cancer. Cancer remains an unsolved problem, and thousands of scientists around the world are working hard to make progress in treating it. What sequence of actions would lead to a better way to block that channel? How can this type of cell be detected in the early stages? How can this tumor be targeted without harming nearby healthy cells? What treatment will successfully eradicate the tumor without making it resistant to treatment? Scientists, like the players of the game, must follow a very narrow path through the movement space, but the situation is much more difficult, and it is not even known whether there is any path at all.
This is exactly what games are designed to do: they present players with a situation and a set of possible actions, and then challenge them to find the correct sequence to achieve a goal. By leveraging this parallel, we can develop citizen science games and design open-ended challenges that enable ordinary people to support scientists on their challenging path. This is the mission of citizen science.
The games that will be made are not like standard games, as the designers know how the goals of the game players can be achieved. But that’s fine. There have long been types of games in which players do things that game designers never dreamed of. In fact, this is almost always the case. The creators of chess could not have dreamed of all the innovations the game would inspire. Designers Pac-Man and Donkey Kong I didn’t even know what the highest possible scores were. In those cases, they at least knew that the game could be completed; Players simply surprised them with new strategies and record breaking. But some puzzles may not have known solutions, and this can make them more motivating. No one has ever discovered this before; I can be the first! As long as the game has clear success conditions, everything else stays the same. We can create games where players try to solve problems that have never been solved before, using a specific set of tools to design something that has never been designed before.
Games appeal to the old circles among us that strive to discover things.
Consider the following challenge: Build a Lego bridge using a fixed set of pieces to support a large weight. The condition for success has been set, but it is not clear whether success is achievable. Then open the problem up to the audience to see if they can discover a solution, or perhaps several solutions. In this way, players can find solutions to a problem that the game designer – or in this case the challenge designer – was not aware of. (This challenge has already been done. In one of the episodes of the TV show Lego Masters(Teams were tasked with building bridges that could hold 1,000 pounds.)
However, the idea here is to explicitly put an unresolved problem of a shared interest into the context of a challenge or game. In fact, there is a long history of games and competitions for the common good. Modern canning and canning techniques arose in part from A bounty offered during the French Revolutionary Wars To anyone who can come up with a cheap way to preserve large quantities of food. In 1714, the British Parliament passed an ‘Act for offering a public bounty to such person or persons as shall discover longitude at sea’, establishing prizes with rewards linked to improvements in accuracy. The bounties have been paid out for more than 100 years, and the results have had a lasting impact on timekeeping accuracy.
In the 1970s, my old boss Bob Horn published A series of books She describes hundreds of board games and simulations that schools and companies have used to tease out complex topics, from highway planning games using hexagonal tile boards to math practice games where students compete to reach a target location using arithmetic to open-ended games like “Urbanista” (intended for graduate students and urban planners) where different stakeholders representing different interests work collectively to achieve an urban space that aligns with their values.
In our time, we have computers, and this has taken the old idea of the game for good or the “serious game” and completely transformed it. The entire field of modern science is available in game-like interfaces within seconds to anyone interested. Citizen games involve solving problems in almost every field of science, from identifying celestial objects (there are only so many human astronomers, and AI has its limits) to transcribing ancient texts to finding new ways to engineer quantum computers.
In the book I focus on three examples, all centered around drug discovery: Eterna, Foldit, and Nanocrafter. All three manipulate the process of engineering the types of molecules that run our bodies. Each game has slightly different mechanics. Foldit is a bonsai-like game where you drag and twist protein folds and see your scores rise and fall. EteRNA is a separate game similar to Sudoku, where an RNA strand is displayed as a colorful string of beads. Players change colors and again, watch the score rise and fall as they try to create an RNA molecule that does specific things, such as folding one way in the presence of one molecule but another way in its absence. Nanocrafter, which is now defunct, was little more than an abstract puzzle game, where strands of DNA fit together like puzzle pieces in a series of slow chemical reactions, and the goal was to create a path that ended in a specific sequence of DNA.
EteRNA and Foldit are noteworthy because they led to actual scientific discoveries that are now in use. The EteRNA Challenge (“OpenVaccine Challenge”) a few years ago asked game players to help design RNA molecules for coronavirus vaccines that do not require ultra-cold storage, allowing for easy storage and transportation, which is especially critical in developing parts of the world. Although attribution is difficult, The challenge was successful; Vaccines today are more stable at room temperature than they used to be.
EteRNA and Foldit are noteworthy because they led to actual scientific discoveries that are now in use.
There is no reason why we cannot move forward on any open issue, including cancer research. Think of it this way: Cancer isn’t just one problem, it’s a giant tree of interconnected problems. It is possible, at least in principle, to turn into an open-ended, play-based challenge. There are thousands of problems related to cancer, and there are thousands of approaches and types of game design, so the potential is huge. Plus, we have all the powerful tools and techniques for game design at our disposal, tools that didn’t exist at this scale even a decade ago.
I should be clear: it is not clear that this strategy will generally allow players to solve problems that professional scientists cannot solve (although this may happen, as in the example of cold storage viruses). But there are additional reasons to pursue this strategy. These games teach players about biology and how the body works, knowledge that can help them make more informed decisions about their health or advocate for others more effectively. Why not slip a little education in? Unusual embodiment of scientific problems in games can push scientists and others to think about current problems in new ways.
It’s an empowering thought: Cancer is a terrible enemy, but we can fight it in tangible ways. Even without a background in biology, you may have skills in art or design, or be good at games. This is enough to contribute. You can build new games and get us a little closer to a cure, and make people a little smarter along the way.
this condition Originally published on MIT Press Reader.
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