Four years ago, players of the video game Borderlands 3 got access to a new mini-game called Borderlands Science. Within the main game, players came across an arcade machine on which they could briefly take a break from the main story to play a simple tile alignment game. Since then, 4.5 million gamers took on the challenge and played the Borderlands Science mini-game. In doing so, they helped researchers learn more about the evolution of more than a million types of bacteria.
The in-game arcade cabinet from which Borderlands 3 players accessed Borderlands Science.
No knowledge of biology was needed to be able to play the mini-game, so how did the players help out? They effectively took over a task that computers tend to struggle with: correctly aligning short overlapping genetic sequences.
Genetic material of any organism is formed of very long strands of DNA or RNA. To figure out the genetic code, the order of the different nucleotides (A, C, G, and T or U) needs to be decoded. This decoding is usually done in small chunks, because it’s not possible to process an entire full length strand at once. These shorter pieces overlap. For example, if you were reading words instead of DNA by this method, you might end up with some chunks that say “BORDE”, “RDERL”, “ERLAN” and “ANDS” and figure out from the overlapping segments that the full word would have been “BORDERLANDS”. It works the same with genetic sequencing, but in some situations the software that does the overlapping struggles to find the full genetic code from the pieces.
Even when computers struggle, humans are very good at this matching task.The problem is just that there are far too many pieces for any individual to map. You would need many people to help out. So as an additional method of finding the overlap, these genetic fragments were turned into colored tiles for the Borderlands Science mini-game. Anyone who played the game by matching these tiles was effectively also lining up pieces of genetic material to form a more complete genetic code for microbes.
It’s not the first time a game was used for this task. The McGill University researchers who created the Borderlands mini game also previously made a similar game called Phylo, but that was a standalone game that was much more directly linked to science. With science-themed games like that, researchers are relying on help from people who are already science fans to volunteer their time. But by implementing a game directly into an already popular video game like Borderlands 3, they suddenly had access to many more players.
“In half a day, the Borderlands Science players collected five times more data about microbial DNA sequences than our earlier game, Phylo, had collected over a 10-year period,” Jérôme Waldispühl, who led the project, told McGill University.
This week, Waldispühl and his colleagues published the results of the Borderlands Science mini-game in Nature Biotechnology, revealing that since the mini-game’s release in April 2020, the players had altogether solved more than 135 million puzzles. With the results of the players’ collective activity, this improved the alignment of genetic material from microbes collected from the human microbiome, which eventually helps researchers understand more about these microbes and how they relate to human health.
It’s not something that could have happened without the millions of Borderlands 3 players who spent some of their in-game time matching tiles. “In a sense, this result is theirs too and they should feel proud about it,” says Waldispühl.