From
Paul Hill.
February 2014.
While most people may not immediately recognise the name of The Rational Group, the company is well known among poker players as the parent of the amazingly popular PokerStars online software. However, a new venture from The Rational Group may put the name squarely in the spotlight for an even larger segment of the population. As part of its program for charitable causes, Helping Hands, the company has recently been involved in a project that seems destined to change the way scientific research is done.
Cancer Research UK is an organisation that is considered to be one of the world leaders when it comes to saving lives and helping cancer patients across the world through the use of research. With no government funding, the non-profit organisation has become synonymous with integrity and has created many programs to advance treatment options for those suffering from the disease of cancer. Almost a year ago, Cancer Research UK started looking for ways to increase the speed of research being done to map out the specific human genes that can be problematic in cancer cases. Their answer of a game may have turned some heads in March of 2013, but this February showed that the organisation was on the right track.
After deciding on a game to give research a boost, Cancer Research UK turned to The Rational Group for help developing the project into a workable product. The Helping Hands program was quick to respond, giving resources in the form of money to fund the game as well as technical support. The two employees assigned to the project were joined by similar employees from Google and other high-profile IT companies like Amazon and Facebook. Together, they hashed out the details of how to turn the mundane task of research into a task that millions of people would be interested in doing.
The result of all this work is Play to Cure: Genes in Space. From the perspective of a player, the game may seem normal. The player takes the role of a futuristic pilot on a mission to scan the galaxy and find as much "Element Alpha" as possible. In fact, the journey of the player is the same process that a researcher would take to find gene patterns in cancer patients, albeit in a very different format. Played on mobile phones, the actions a player makes are recorded and then returned to the research organisation. Accuracy is maintained by many players working on the same problems to arrive to a consensus answer.
Genes in Space may be an extremely new game, but scientists have already noticed the huge response and are wondering how the model might be applied to other problems. The game is the first to effectively link difficult scientific problems with the general public, but it certainly will not be the last.
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