Borderlands Science is one of the first examples of a citizen science game being embedded in a mainstream video game; it translates players' tile matching into sequence alignment of microbial DNA strands that encode ribosomal RNA.
Since launch, over four million gamers have played Borderlands Science, collectively solving over one hundred and thirty-five million puzzles, making this one of the largest citizen science projects ever.
"We didn't know whether the players of a popular game like Borderlands 3 would be interested or whether the results would be good enough to improve on what was already known about microbial evolution. But we've been amazed by the results," said Jérôme Waldispühl, a professor at McGill University and senior author of the paper, in a statement.
Often, citizen science games closely resemble the actual scientific task being carried out and involve finding solutions to complex problems, such as optimizing protein folding in Foldit. Although this has the potential of generating very useful results, the complexity can be off-putting and reduce player engagement and retention, restricting the audience to people with a prior interest in science.
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