Iceland is a beautiful country but also a special place for citizen science video games. Reykjavik is the home of CCP games, the developer of Eve Online. Eve Online was the first AAA video game to host a citizen science activity: Project Discovery. Since 2016, Project Discovery made contributions to cellular biology (Phase 1: annotation for the human protein atlas from 2016 to 2018), Astronomy (Phase 2: search for exoplanets from 2018 to 2020), and immunology (Phase 3: annotation of flow cytometry for COVID studies since 2020).
On September 21st-23rd 2023, CCP organized the EVE Online Fanfest. Thousands of participants from all over the world gathered in Reykjavik to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the game. We gave a presentation there and it was a fantastic opportunity to update the community about the results but also next phases of Project Discovery. At this occasion, we announced the upcoming citizen science mobile platform, revealed exciting scientific results from the data collected through Phase 3, and introduced the new phase of Project Discovery focusing on flow cytometry data analysis for Cancer research.
If you want to catch up with our presentation, you can watch it again at:
But the trip was not over! A couple of days later, we participated to a panel at the prestigious gaming conference DICE Europe. And for the first time, Borderlands Science met Project Discovery. The panel was composed of Sébastien Caisse (Gearbox Studio Québec), Sveinbjörn Magnússon (CCP games), Attila Szantner and Jérôme Waldispühl. During this one-hour event, we discussed the history of our citizen science games but also unique opportunities it offers for the video game industry. The full discussion was not recorded but we will write soon a post that recapitulates the content of our discussions. Stay tuned!