Games for Good
We invent responsible video games
We are researchers that work with the industry to build responsible video games
MISSION
We develop new ways to use popular games to solve scientific problems and make valuable research progress.
VISION
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.
VALUES
- 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
The impact of our work
We engaged several millions and collected over half a billion contributions
"So there's your incentive, folks. Stay on Borderlands 3 and save some lives"
Evening Standard
"By simply completing levels in the mini-game you’ll help correct millions of small computer errors that arise as scientists try to map the microbiome of the human gut"
Kotaku
"Sometimes, contributing to breakthroughs in science can be as simple as playing a game"
Discover Magazine
Total Games Played
Combined amount of games played from all our projects.
Total Users
Combined amount of users who contributed from all our projects.
Projects Launched
Total amount of projects and variations of them we have successfully launched
Total Games Played
Combined amount of games played from all our projects.
Total Users
Combined amount of users who contributed from all our projects.
Projects Launched
Total amount of projects and variations of them we have successfully launched
"So there's your incentive, folks. Stay on Borderlands 3 and save some lives"
Evening Standard
"By simply completing levels in the mini-game you’ll help correct millions of small computer errors that arise as scientists try to map the microbiome of the human gut"
Kotaku
"Sometimes, contributing to breakthroughs in science can be as simple as playing a game"
Discover Magazine
Blog
Publications
/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
Human-supervised clustering of multidimensional data using crowdsourcing,
Butyaev Alexander, Drogaris Chrisostomos, Tremblay-Savard Olivier, and Waldispühl JérômeRoyal Society Open Science, 9, pages 211189
/JOURNAL
Leveling up citizen science,
Waldispühl, Jérôme, Szantner, Attila, Knight, Rob, Caisse, Sébastien, and Pitchford, RandyNature Biotechnology volume 38, pages 1124–1126 (2020)
/JOURNAL
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, JérômebioRxiv, 2019.
/JOURNAL
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, AntoinePLoS Comput Biol 14, pages e1005955, 03, 2018
/JOURNAL
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 LundbergNature Biotechnology volume 36, pages 820–828 (2018)
/JOURNAL
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 IbioRxiv, Cold Spring Harbor Labs Journals, pages 156141, 2017.
/CONFERENCE
Lessons from an online massive genomics computer game,
Singh, Akash, Ahsan, Faizy, Blanchette, Mathieu, and Waldispühl, JérômeIn Proceedings of the Fifth AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2017), 2017.
/JOURNAL
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
Crowdsourcing RNA structural alignments with an online computer game,
Waldispühl, Jérôme, Kam, Arthur, and Gardner, Paul PIn Proceedings of the 20th Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, pages 330-41, 2015.
/MISC
Un jeu pour faire avancer la génétique,
Waldispühl, JérômeIn “La Recherche”, 491, pages 46-51, September, 2014.
/JOURNAL
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, JérômeGenome Biol, 14, pages R116, October, 2013.
/JOURNAL
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, JérômePLoS One, 7, pages e31362, March, 2012.
Talks
/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
“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
“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
“Leveling Up Citizen Science for Bioinformatics Data Analysis”.
Invited talk at the University of Ottawa Bioinformatics seminar series. Ottawa (Canada)./KEYNOTE
“Leveling Up Citizen Science”.
Keynote at the 15th Great Lakes Bioinformatics (GLBIO) conference. Montréal (Canada)./TALK
“Leveling Up Citizen Science for AMR research”.
Invited talk at the 2023 McGill AMR Annual Symposium. Montréal (Canada)./JOURNAL
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“Engaging genomics research through online video games”.
Invited presentation at public conference Mat’Inno organized by the Junior Chamber of commerce of Montreal./TALK
“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
“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
“Crowdsourcing genomics research”.
Invited seminar, Chemistry department, University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France./TALK
“Helping Genetic Research Through Guilt-free Gaming”.
Guest lecture for BIOT505, McGill University./TALK
“Using games for research-based learning”.
Invited lecture at the CRI Workshop “Leadership program”, Paris, France./TALK
“Crowdsourcing Genomics Research”.
Invited seminar, Computer Science & Artifi- cial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA./TALK
“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
“Helping Genetic Research Through Guilt-free Gaming”.
Guest lecture for BIOT505, McGill University./TALK
“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
“Crowdsourcing Genomic Data Analysis with Human-Computing Video Games”.
Invited talk at the White House OSTP Crowdsource Games Workshop, Washington, DC, USA. ,/TALK
“Crowdsourcing Genomic Data Analysis with Human-Computing Video Games”
Invited talk at the CRI Workshop “Leadership program”, Paris, France./TALK
“Phylo: A Citizen Science Approach to Com- parative Genomics”.
Invited Departmental Seminar, Shriner’s Hospital, Montreal, Canada./TALK
“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
“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
“Helping Genetic Research Through Guilt-free Gaming”.
Talk at the Fabelier seminar series, University Paris 5 Descartes, Paris, France./TALK
“PHYLO: help cure disease through guilt-free gaming”.
Invited lecture, Game Developer Conference, San Francisco, USA./TALK
“PHYLO: help cure disease through guilt-free gaming”.
Talk at the Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, USA./TALK
“PHYLO: Play video games and help Science”.
Invited lecture, CUSP Conference, Museum of Modern Art, Chicago, USA.News
Nominations and awards
won
by our projects.
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
Team Members
Principal Investigators
Scientific Collaborators
Professional Staff
Graduate Students
Alumni
Julien Mounthanyvong
Tim Keding
Got a project?
Let’s talk.
We are very excited to discuss new ideas and are very keen on new collaborations in both, science and industry