The Modern Journalist

Lab to Use Games to for HIV Research

Since games are on my mind these days, I’ve been keeping my eyes out for innovative ways that people are using Alternate Reality Game-like structures to solve problems.

The more I read about them, the more excited I am about the possibility of news organizations incorporating this community-styled project to engage in its readers.

Today, my old publication has a story about a research lab designing a game to help create potential protein vaccinations for HIV and the story points out a concept that we’ve been discussing in part on the social network: computers crunch data and people add context.

The game, called Foldit, is part of Baker’s vision for the future of protein engineering. His algorithms are good at the nitty-gritty of generating completely novel protein sequences for a particular purpose. But humans, who are better at seeing the big picture than computers are, could improve computer-designed proteins by playing the game.

The idea of melding reality and virtual worlds to solve actual problems is something that Chris Graves from the Enquirer posted on the social network. She’s a former crime reporter and proposed creating some type of game around unsolved crimes.

Set up an ARG around real life facts of a cold/unsolved case and ask folks to “play the game” to solve the crime.

Complete with suspects, forensics and crime facts and police investigatory files. As Brad knows, I really don’t know much about games and gaming .. but it seems to me if there were layers of puzzle solving related to this with the end quest toward assembling the puzzle pieces, one might arrive at a ‘likely” suspect.

I’m not sure how effective a game like this would be because it involves privacy and legal issues, but the idea is intriguing enough. These are types of ideas newspapers and other organizations should be kicking around as they try to parse out what community involvement and interactivity looks like.

The issue that papers — and labs — will face is administering this. It’s important that they recognize the need for technical and community manager support personnel to make sure everything runs smoothly. These need to be dedicated staff because nothing kills a community more than unattended and non-functioning technology.

Still, we’re seeing a growth in these types of scenarios and that’s encouraging.