Games as scientific research
Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2014 8:59 am
[they] think the gaming approach to biology offers some distinct - and to many scientists, perhaps unexpected - advantages over the more-traditional scientific method by which scientists solve problems: form a hypothesis, rigorously test it in your lab under controlled conditions, and keep it all to yourself until you at last submit your methods, data and conclusions to a journal for peer review and, if all goes well, publication.
http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2014/10/0 ... -research/Das and Treuille argue that the "open laboratory" nature of online games prevents data manipulation, allows rapid tests of reproducibility, and "requires rigorous adherence to the scientific method: a nontrivial prediction or hypothesis must precede each experiment."
Das says, "It only recently hit us that EteRNA, despite being a game, is an unusually rigorous way to do science."