Games for Good

We invent responsible video games

We develop new ways to use popular games to solve scientific problems and make valuable research progress.

The video game of tomorrow becomes a responsible way to participate in resolving scientific and social problems. They connect and build trust of society in science and game industry.

Reliable: we are responsible for our scientific outcomes
Trustworthy: we believe in strong partnership
Focused: we love projects with concrete impact and deliverables
Educational: we communicate science to people
Talent development: we train experts who believe in sustainable gaming

Our Projects

We engaged several millions and collected over half a billion contributions

Combined amount of games played from all our projects.

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Games Played

Combined amount of users who contributed from all our projects.

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Users

Total amount of projects and variations of them we have successfully launched

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Projects

Combined amount of games played from all our projects.

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Games Played

Combined amount of users who contributed from all our projects.

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Users

Total amount of projects and variations of them we have successfully launched

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Projects

2021-11-22

RCIScience

ON THE BORDER: WHERE SCIENCE MEETS GAMING

2021-05-03

Off the Cuff Series

EPISODE 4 – THE GAMERS SAVING THE WORLD

2022-09-14

ECSA – European Citizen Science Association

GAMERS FOR SCIENCE: GAMIFICATION IN CITIZEN SCIENCE

Blog

/JOURNAL

April 2024.

Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science
within a mass-market video game

Roman Sarrazin-Gendron, Parham Ghasemloo Gheidari, Alexander Butyaev, Timothy Keding, Eddie Cai, Jiayue Zheng, Renata Mutalova, Julien
Mounthanyvong, Yuxue Zhu, Elena Nazarova, Chrisostomos Drogaris, Kornél Erhart, Borderlands Science Development Team, Borderlands Science players,
Amélie Brouillette, Gabriel Richard, Randy Pitchford, Sébastien Caisse, Mathieu Blanchette, Daniel McDonald, Rob Knight, Attila Szantner and Jérôme Waldispühl.

Nat Biotechnol. 2024.

/PROCEEDINGS

June 2024.

Learning the Game: Decoding the Differences Between Novice and Expert Players in a Citizen Science Game With Millions of Players

Eddie Cai, Roman Sarrazin-Gendron, Renata Mutalova, Parham Ghasemloo Gheidari, Alexander Butyaev, Gabriel Richard, Sébastien Caisse, Rob Knight, Attila Szantner and Jérôme Waldispühl.

To appear.

/JOURNAL

March/April 2024.

When online citizen science meets teaching: Storyfication of a science discovery game to teach, learn, and contribute to genomic research,

Chrisostomos Drogaris, Alexander Butyaev, Elena Nazarova, Roman Sarrazin-Gendron, Harsh Patel, Akash Singh, Brenden Kadota and Jérôme Waldispühl.

Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education. 2024; 52(2): 145–155.

/PROCEEDINGS

November 2023.

Player-Guided AI outperforms standard AI in Sequence Alignment Puzzles

Renata Mutalova, Roman Sarrazin-Gendron, Parham Ghasemloo Gheidari, Eddie Cai, Gabriel Richard, Sébastien Caisse, Rob Knight, Mathieu Blanchette, Attila Szantner and Jérôme Waldispühl

Proceedings of the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference (CI’23). 2023, p. 53-62.

/PROCEEDINGS

April 2023.

Playing the System: Can Puzzle Players Teach us How to Solve Hard Problems?

Renata Mutalova, Roman Sarrazin-Gendron, Eddie Cai, Gabriel Richard, Parham Ghasemloo Gheidari, Sébastien Caisse, Rob Knight, Mathieu Blanchette, Attila Szantner and Jérôme Waldispühl.

Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2023, Article No.: 679.

/JOURNAL

May 2022.

Human-supervised clustering of multidimensional data using crowdsourcing,

Butyaev Alexander, Drogaris Chrisostomos, Tremblay-Savard Olivier, and Waldispühl Jérôme
Royal Society Open Science, 9, pages 211189

/JOURNAL

September 2020.

Leveling up citizen science,

Waldispühl, Jérôme, Szantner, Attila, Knight, Rob, Caisse, Sébastien, and Pitchford, Randy
Nature Biotechnology volume 38, pages 1124–1126 (2020)

/JOURNAL

2019.

3DGV: Immersive Exploration of 3D Genome Structures using Virtual Reality

Zhang, Eric, Drogaris, Chrisostomos, Gédon, Antoine, Sossin, Aaron, Faraj, Rajae, Chen, Haifen, Cyr, Yan, Majewski, Jacek, Blanchette, Mathieu, and Waldispühl, Jérôme
bioRxiv, 2019.

/JOURNAL

March 2018

Ten simple rules to create a serious game, illustrated with examples from structural biology.

Baaden, Marc, Delalande, Olivier, Ferey, Nicolas, Pasquali, Samuela, Waldispühl, Jérôme, and Taly, Antoine
PLoS Comput Biol 14, pages e1005955, 03, 2018

/JOURNAL

October 2018.

Deep learning is combined with massive-scale citizen science to improve large-scale image classification,

Devin P Sullivan, Casper F Winsnes, Lovisa Åkesson, Martin Hjelmare, Mikaela Wiking, Rutger Schutten, Linzi Campbell, Hjalti Leifsson, Scott Rhodes, Andie Nordgren, Kevin Smith, Bernard Revaz, Bergur Finnbogason, Attila Szantner & Emma Lundberg
Nature Biotechnology volume 36, pages 820–828 (2018)

/JOURNAL

July 2017.

Science Game Lab: tool for the unification of biomedical games with a purpose,

Good, Benjamin, Santini, Sarah, Wallace, Margaret, Fortugno, Nicholas, Szeder, John, Mooney, Patrick, Waldispühl, Jérôme, Tsueng, Ginger, and Su, Andrew I
bioRxiv, Cold Spring Harbor Labs Journals, pages 156141, 2017.

/CONFERENCE

September 2017.

Lessons from an online massive genomics computer game,

Singh, Akash, Ahsan, Faizy, Blanchette, Mathieu, and Waldispühl, Jérôme
In Proceedings of the Fifth AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2017), 2017.

/JOURNAL

January 2016.

Massively Multiplayer Online Science,

Attila Szantner Levelling Up: The Cultural Impact of Contemporary Video games

/JOURNAL

October 2016.

Collaborative Solving in a Human Computing Game Using a Market, Skills and Challenges,

Tremblay-Savard, Olivier, Butyaev, Alexander, and Waldispühl, Jérôme
In Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, ACM, pages 130-141, 2016.

/CONFERENCE

2015.

Crowdsourcing RNA structural alignments with an online computer game,

Waldispühl, Jérôme, Kam, Arthur, and Gardner, Paul P
In Proceedings of the 20th Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, pages 330-41, 2015.

/MISC

September 2014.

Un jeu pour faire avancer la génétique,

Waldispühl, Jérôme
In “La Recherche”, 491, pages 46-51, September, 2014.

/JOURNAL

October 2013.

Open-Phylo: a customizable crowd-computing platform for multiple sequence alignment,

Kwak, Daniel, Kam, Alfred, Becerra, David, Zhou, Qikuan, Hops, Adam, Zarour, Eleyine, Kam, Arthur, Sarmenta, Luis, Blanchette, Mathieu, and Waldispühl, Jérôme
Genome Biol, 14, pages R116, October, 2013.

/JOURNAL

March 2012.

Phylo: a citizen science approach for improving multiple sequence alignment,

Kawrykow, Alexander, Roumanis, Gary, Kam, Alfred, Kwak, Daniel, Leung, Clarence, Wu, Chu, Zarour, Eleyine, {Phylo players}, Sarmenta, Luis, Blanchette, Mathieu, and Waldispühl, Jérôme
PLoS One, 7, pages e31362, March, 2012.

/TALK

April 4, 2024.

“Le jeu video peut-il fournir les ressources humaines nécessaires pour analyser les données scientifiques ?”.

Invited talk at the TimeWorld Energue. Trois-Rivières QC (Canada). Roman Sarrazin-Gendron.

/KEYNOTE

March 27, 2024.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science for (meta)genomic research”.

Keynote at the Western Canada Bioinformatics and Omics conference (BioNet 2024) conference. Banff AB (Canada). Jérôme Waldispühl.

/TALK

November 8, 2023.

“Player-Guided AI outperforms standard AI in Sequence Alignment Puzzles”.

Contributed talk at the ACM Collective Intelligence conference, Delft (Netherlands), Renata Mutalova.

/KEYNOTE

September 22, 2023.

“What has Project Discovery, Discovered?”.

Keynote talk at 2023 Eve Online Fanfest. Reykjavik “2023 Eve Online Fanfest”, Reykjavik (Iceland). Attila Szantner, Jérôme Waldispühl & Dr. Ryan Brinkman

/PANEL

September 25-27, 2023.

“Paradigm Shift in Citizen Science: Videogame Player Helping Researcher”.

Panel discussion at 2023 D.I.C.E. Reykjavik “2023 Speakers & Roundtable Leaders”, Reykjavik (Iceland).

/KEYNOTE

June 29, 2023.

“Paradigm Shift in Citizen Science: Videogame Player Helping Researcher”.

Keynote talk at GSGS 2023 “8th International Conference on Gamification and Serious Games”, Neuchâtel (Switzerland).

/TALK

April 25, 2023.

“Playing the System: Can Puzzle Players Teach us How to Solve Hard Problems?”.

Contributed talk at CHI 2023 “ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems”, Hamburg (Germany).

/TALK

March 17, 2023.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science for Bioinformatics Data Analysis”.

Invited talk at the University of Ottawa Bioinformatics seminar series. Ottawa (Canada).

/KEYNOTE

May 16, 2023.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science”.

Keynote at the 15th Great Lakes Bioinformatics (GLBIO) conference. Montréal (Canada).

/TALK

May 25 2023.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science for AMR research”.

Invited talk at the 2023 McGill AMR Annual Symposium. Montréal (Canada).

/JOURNAL

April 25, 2023.

“Playing the System: Can Puzzle Players Teach us How to Solve Hard Problems? ”.

Invited talk at the CHI 2023 “ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems”.

/TALK

May 5, 2022.

“L’IA permettra-t-elle de mobiliser l’intelligence collective des joueurs de jeux vidéo au service de la science et de la génomique?”.

Invited talk at the TimeWorld conference (https://timeworldevent.com/2022montreal/en/). Montréal QC (Canada).
Recording at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qSACbTaQh0.

/TALK

May 26, 2022.

“Societal Video Games: A Trend for the Future”.

Invited talk at La Caravane – conference of the Quebec’s video game studios (https://www.laguilde.quebec/en/lacaravane/). Shawinigan QC (Canada).
(with Attila Szantner)

/TALK

June 25, 2022.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science”.

Keynote at the Games and Natural Language Processing Workshop at LREC 2022 (https://gamesandnlp.com/). Marseille (France).

/TALK

Sep 14, 2022.

“Gamers for Science: Gamification in Citizen Science”.

Invited webinar for the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA). Online.
(with Attila Szantner)
Recording at https://youtube.com/watch?v=b-kISrvzuFo&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE

/TALK

Oct 20, 2022.

“L’IA en science et en recherche”.

Panel member at the Annual meeting of the Association pour l’enseignement de la science et de la technologie au Québec (https://congres.aestq.org/fr/). Drummondville QC (Canada).
Coverage at https://www.cscience.ca/2022/10/21/lia-et-la-science-un-mariage-parfait/

/TALK

Oct 21, 2022.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science”.

Invited talk at the 50th Anniversary of the McGill, School of Computer Science. Montréal QC (Canada).

/TALK

Nov 18, 2022.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science”.

Invited talk at the colloquium of the school of computer science at the university of Windsor (https://tinyurl.com/2p89vt6p). Windsor ON (Canada).

/TALK

January 28, 2021.

“Borderlands Science”.

Talk at Amazon “Voice of the Customer” seminar series (with Attila Szantner and Jonathan Moreau-Genest).

/TALK

February 5, 2021.

“Borderlands Science”.

Invited short talk at the 31st edition of Soup & Science. https://youtu.be/XTMTVUiF5t0

/TALK

May 3, 2021.

“Le potentiel des jeux en ligne pour les sciences participatives”.

Invited talk at the 88e congrès de l’ACFAS “Engagement des Québécois et des Québécoises en sciences : pratiques multiformes”. https://youtu.be/iF0opv8Stz4

/TALK

May 13, 2021.

“On the Border: Where Science Meets Gaming”.

Invited online webinar organized by The Royal Canadian Institute for Science (with Gabriel Richard, Sarah Hays, and Nikki Stout). https://youtu.be/N2k6snGSPn0

/TALK

July 13, 2021.

“One Billion Guns vs. One Billion Nucleotides”.

Invited panel member at the Games 4 Change Festival (with Rob Knight, Randy Pitchford, and Attila Szantner).

/TALK

July 13, 2020.

“Bioinformatics outside the lab: How to mobilize online citizen scientists to accelerate research”.

Introduction talk for the special session on Citizen Science that I organized at the 28th annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2020).

/TALK

October 7, 2020.

“How AI, Citizen Science, and Human Computation Are Facilitating the Next Leap Forward”.

Keynote presentation and panel discussion at Bio-IT World Conference & Expo.

/TALK

May 15, 2019.

“Les approches coopératives de recherche en modélisation moléculaire”.

Invited panelist at the Civilization Museum of Québec.

/TALK

March 20, 2019.

“Analysis and Synthesis of RNA Structures: Genesis of a computational platform to manipulate the RNA code”.

Invited speaker at the Montreal RNA Salon (https://www.mtlrna.org/).

/TALK

Feb 12, 2019.

“Les approches coopératives de recherche en modélisation moléculaire”.

Invited seminar presentation at the department of Computer Science of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).

/TALK

November 29, 2018.

“Les approches coopératives de recherche en modélisation moléculaire”.

Invited presentation at the symposium “La science hors-murs au 21e siècle” organized by the French Academy of Science (i.e. the equivalent of the Royal Society). Streaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J64Tve_QKws.

/TALK

May 26, 2018.

“(Intelligence artificielle) artificielle pour la génomique”.

Invited talk and panelist at the annual conference of the Association des Communicateurs Scientifiques (http://www.acs.qc.ca/activite/2113-congres-2018-de-l-acs.html).

/TALK

April 4, 2018.

“Engaging genomics research through online video games”.

Invited presentation at public conference Mat’Inno organized by the Junior Chamber of commerce of Montreal.

/TALK

February 7, 2018.

“Human-centered systems in computational genomics”.

Invited presentation at the Genome Quebec Science Symposium for Science and Industry Advisory Committee, Genome Québec. (A private symposium organized by Genome Québec for its advisory board. The event features 5 invited speakers presenting cutting-edge researchin genomics conducted in Québec)

/TALK

December 8, 2017.

“Le codage informatique à la rencontre du codage de l’ADN”.

PER en direct (Webinar for high-school students), Canada. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmnS7eblYpI)

/TALK

November 17, 2017.

“Helping genetic research through guilt-free gaming”.

Guest lecture for BIOT 505, McGill University. (3-hours invited lecture on state-of-the-art biotechnology techniques)

/TALK

February 26, 2016.

“Crowdsourcing genomics research”.

Invited seminar, Chemistry department, University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France.

/TALK

November 13, 2015.

“Helping Genetic Research Through Guilt-free Gaming”.

Guest lecture for BIOT505, McGill University.

/TALK

April 15, 2015.

“Using games for research-based learning”.

Invited lecture at the CRI Workshop “Leadership program”, Paris, France.

/TALK

March 4, 2015.

“Crowdsourcing Genomics Research”.

Invited seminar, Computer Science & Artifi- cial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA.

/TALK

November 19, 2014.

“Helping Genetic Research Through Guilt-free Gaming”.

Invited lecture at POP! (symposium organized by the association of students in bioinformatics at UdM), Université de Montréal University.

/TALK

November 14, 2014.

“Helping Genetic Research Through Guilt-free Gaming”.

Guest lecture for BIOT505, McGill University.

/TALK

November 6, 2014.

“Video game players advancing genetic research”.

Fourth Montreal Summit on Innovation, Montreal, Canada.

/TALK

April 30, 2014.

“Phylo: A human-computing game for genomic research”.

Games & Crowds Workshop, Washington, DC, USA.

/TALK

April 29, 2014

“Crowdsourcing Genomic Data Analysis with Human-Computing Video Games”.

Invited talk at the White House OSTP Crowdsource Games Workshop, Washington, DC, USA. ,

/TALK

March 26, 2014.

“Crowdsourcing Genomic Data Analysis with Human-Computing Video Games”

Invited talk at the CRI Workshop “Leadership program”, Paris, France.

/TALK

February 8th, 2013.

“Phylo: A Citizen Science Approach to Com- parative Genomics”.

Invited Departmental Seminar, Shriner’s Hospital, Montreal, Canada.

/TALK

November 13, 2012.

“Bring Your Own Data follow-up session”.

Invited panelist at round table organized by the U.S. Department of Health and Emergencies, Washington D.C., USA.

/TALK

July 14, 2012.

“Learning Through Research”, Paris, France. “Helping Genetic Research Through Guilt-free Gaming”.

Invited lecture, International Workshop

/TALK

June 13, 2012.

“Phylo: Crowdsourcing Genetic Data Analysis”.

Invited lecture, Game for Health Conference 2012, Boston, USA.

/TALK

May 22, 2012.

“Helping Genetic Research Through Guilt-free Gaming”.

Talk at the Fabelier seminar series, University Paris 5 Descartes, Paris, France.

/TALK

March 5, 2012.

“PHYLO: help cure disease through guilt-free gaming”.

Invited lecture, Game Developer Conference, San Francisco, USA.

/TALK

March 2, 2012.

“PHYLO: help cure disease through guilt-free gaming”.

Talk at the Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, USA.

/TALK

September 28-30, 2011.

“PHYLO: Play video games and help Science”.

Invited lecture, CUSP Conference, Museum of Modern Art, Chicago, USA.

News

Unable to load Tweets

Our users understand the value of our projects and their impact. It is our great honour for our team to be recognized for these projects.

Project Discovery
Public Service, Activism, and Social Impact
Peoples Voice Winner, 2021

Principal Investigators

Jérôme Waldispühl

McGill

Attila Szantner

McGill

Mathieu Blanchette

McGill

Rob Knight

USDC

Ryan Brinkmann

BCCRC

Alexander Butayaev

Research Associate | McGill

Chris Drogaris

Game Developer | McGill

Kornél Erhart

Platform Architect | Morgan Stanley

Roman Sarrazin

PhD Student | McGill

Partners

We are very excited to discuss new ideas and are very keen on new collaborations in both, science and industry

Games for Good

We invent responsible video games

We are researchers that work with the industry to build responsible video games

MISSION

VISION

VALUES

Our Projects

Borderlands Science

Project Discovery

Colony B

Phylo DNA Puzzles

The impact of our work

We engaged several millions and collected over half a billion contributions

Evening Standard

Kotaku

Discover Magazine

Total Games Played

Total Users

Projects Launched

Total Games Played

Total Users

Projects Launched

Evening Standard

Kotaku

Discover Magazine

The Press

Red Bull TV

MMOS – MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ONLINE SCIENCE

RCIScience

ON THE BORDER: WHERE SCIENCE MEETS GAMING

Off the Cuff Series

EPISODE 4 – THE GAMERS SAVING THE WORLD

ECSA – European Citizen Science Association

GAMERS FOR SCIENCE: GAMIFICATION IN CITIZEN SCIENCE

Blog

A look back (and a look ahead) on citizen science

“Too many to count.” FL4K, the Beastmaster.

When Borderlands Science meets Project Discovery

Concrete examples of microbiome-based medicine

A look back (and a look ahead) on citizen science

Publications

Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen sciencewithin a mass-market video game

Learning the Game: Decoding the Differences Between Novice and Expert Players in a Citizen Science Game With Millions of Players

When online citizen science meets teaching: Storyfication of a science discovery game to teach, learn, and contribute to genomic research,

Player-Guided AI outperforms standard AI in Sequence Alignment Puzzles

Playing the System: Can Puzzle Players Teach us How to Solve Hard Problems?

Human-supervised clustering of multidimensional data using crowdsourcing,

Leveling up citizen science,

3DGV: Immersive Exploration of 3D Genome Structures using Virtual Reality

Ten simple rules to create a serious game, illustrated with examples from structural biology.

Deep learning is combined with massive-scale citizen science to improve large-scale image classification,

Science Game Lab: tool for the unification of biomedical games with a purpose,

Lessons from an online massive genomics computer game,

Massively Multiplayer Online Science,

Collaborative Solving in a Human Computing Game Using a Market, Skills and Challenges,

Crowdsourcing RNA structural alignments with an online computer game,

Un jeu pour faire avancer la génétique,

Open-Phylo: a customizable crowd-computing platform for multiple sequence alignment,

Phylo: a citizen science approach for improving multiple sequence alignment,

Talks

“Le jeu video peut-il fournir les ressources humaines nécessaires pour analyser les données scientifiques ?”.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science for (meta)genomic research”.

“Player-Guided AI outperforms standard AI in Sequence Alignment Puzzles”.

“What has Project Discovery, Discovered?”.

“Paradigm Shift in Citizen Science: Videogame Player Helping Researcher”.

“Paradigm Shift in Citizen Science: Videogame Player Helping Researcher”.

“Playing the System: Can Puzzle Players Teach us How to Solve Hard Problems?”.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science for Bioinformatics Data Analysis”.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science”.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science for AMR research”.

“Playing the System: Can Puzzle Players Teach us How to Solve Hard Problems? ”.

“L’IA permettra-t-elle de mobiliser l’intelligence collective des joueurs de jeux vidéo au service de la science et de la génomique?”.

“Societal Video Games: A Trend for the Future”.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science”.

“Gamers for Science: Gamification in Citizen Science”.

“L’IA en science et en recherche”.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science”.

“Leveling Up Citizen Science”.

“Borderlands Science”.

“Borderlands Science”.

Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science
within a mass-market video game

Nominations and awards
won by our projects.

Got a project?
Let’s talk.