Data Point: 4 million gamers contributed to microbiome research in Borderlands 3

From The Source: Nature Biotechnology

“[Borderlands Science] crowdsources a multiple alignment task of 1 million 16S ribosomal RNA sequences obtained from human microbiome studies. Since its initial release on 7 April 2020, over 4 million players have solved more than 135 million science puzzles, a task unsolvable by a single individual. Leveraging these results, we show that our multiple sequence alignment simultaneously improves microbial phylogeny estimations and UniFrac effect sizes compared to state-of-the-art computational methods. This achievement demonstrates that hyper-gamified scientific tasks attract massive crowds of contributors and offers invaluable resources to the scientific community.”

A screenshot from “Borderlands Science”

Analysis: Crowdsourcing is hardly a new concept, but leveraging the power of the masses at this scale for a tangible research benefit is notable. The Borderlands Science mini-game, powered by UC San Diego’s Microsetta Initiative, reached a large user base thanks to its integration into Borderlands 3 – a first-person shooter published in 2019. As of last year, it shipped 18 million copies worldwide – mass reach that instantly gave this research effort the capability to succeed. This is especially true when a user base contributes for fun (after already paying for the game) instead of working for direct monetary benefit. Other researchers have attempted this kind of effort, but none have reached the same scale, nor are they seeing the same sort of evergreen returns.

Borderlands Science reached a record mass of participants, and is continuing to get tens of thousands of solutions per month. (Fig. 5: Player Engagement)

This is thanks, in part, to the simplicity of the puzzles as well. Per Ars Technica, “Borderlands Science takes a new design approach to try to overcome these challenges, breaking the overall scientific problem into lots of bite-sized puzzles… [E]ach puzzle makes a small contribution to optimizing an overall sequence solution. This simplification, or gamification, means people are more likely to engage with the tasks, but even if a player completes only a few puzzles, it's still useful.”

Up For Debate: How can non-scientific organizations adopt this kind of gamification for their research and insights-gathering efforts? Video games don’t uniquely have access to such large audiences. Any organization with a large built-in audience could consider reciprocal value exchanges, whether for entertainment, altruism, or another motivation entirely.

Plenty of organizations already tap their loyalists for campaigns, content amplification, or insights — but maybe there’s a way to make that more entertaining?