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Harnessing EVE Online For Science (mmorpg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists and the developers of space MMORPG EVE Online are working on a project to harness the power of the game's huge playerbase to do useful scientific work. The Human Protein Atlas has 13 million images to map, and there's no way a small team of scientists can manage that task alone. CCP Games, the makers of EVE, will try to encourage contribution by creating a mini-game within EVE to train players and get them to do some cataloging. To start, "Project Discovery will feed about a 250,000 images of microscopic cells and tissue that players will then study to identify basic shapes and structures, categorizing the images in a way that will help scientists deduce a given protein's purpose." The developers are confident that the EVE community, which has already come together to support various charity endeavors, will rally behind this noble cause as well. To get players to participate, the devs reward players with loyalty points that have some sort of positive effect within EVE.
Has the writer ever actually played eve? It's a game about causing other players as much frustration as possible. And now they want to give the players a chance to mess up something even more important than internet spaceships?
I think this is a more balanced take on the issue.
Neal Stephenson had this as a plot point in his book REAMDE. An MMORPG had a mini-game where you had to recognize some objects, but actually they were being fed TSA machine images from the airports, looking for dangerous objects in luggage.