game

Play a Game and Help Cure Cancer

- Adam Clare

This month Cancer Research UK released a game that helped scientists find a cure for cancer. It takes the obscure data that needs to be analyzed and translates that into a fun little game which can be played on Android or Apple devices. The aggregate data of players help scientists understand what’s going on in the body when someone is impacted by cancer.

The game’s ingenuity lies in its simplicity. Racking up the combined data crunching power of what we hope will be thousands of casual gamers will help our scientists spot the subtle patterns and peaks and troughs in the data, which correspond to DNA faults.

The power of Element Alpha is of course completely fictional, but the power of the data it represents could be exceptional. Our scientists will be trawling through the results as they come in and looking for crucial clues in the quest for new cancer treatments.

So what are you waiting for? Start collecting mysterious Element Alpha to help us solve the mystery of cancer sooner.

More here.

Thanks to Craig!

A Game Designed to Help Solve Eye Problems

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Diplopia – A VR Game to Help Strabismus and Amblyopia is exactly what it sounds like. This sounds like a great gaming project! The game is meant to help people who have some eye issues strengthen their weak eye to restore (near) perfect control over their stereo-vision.

You can contribute to the project at IndieGogo (only 6 days left!).

From the developer:

Strabismus, better known as crossed eye, is present in about 4% of children. In those affected both eyes do not line up properly causing diplopia (double vision), amblyopia (lazy eye), and loss of vision in one or both eyes. Since the brain receives conflicting information from the two eyes it often learns to disregard the weaker of the two, suppressing it. This leads to a loss of depth perception and 3D vision.

Contribute now at Indiegogo.
Find out more at the official website.

Board Game Jam 2012

- Adam Clare

Board Game Jam is happening in Toronto February 25-26! If you’ve ever wanted to make a game then this is a place to start!

Here’s a special challenge to Things Are Good readers: make a game that is designed to educate or empower people to make the world a better place. If you do, find me at the event and I’ll post all the good games later on!

Board Game Jam
Board Game Jam

At the same time, even while videogames seem to occupy the headlines, the world of board gaming is seeing a resurgence in some smaller part of our collective consciousness. All the hipsters know how to play Settlers of Catan, and Snakes & Lattes seems to be packed every single day. If you ask me, it’s part of some broader reconnection to real social interaction in so-called “meatspace,” but I’ll spare you the philosophizin’.

The point is that board games are both wonderfully accessible and quite deep. Everyone can intuitively understand the basics of what goes into making a board game. On a mechanical level, it’s simple arts and crafts. For people looking to be creative, that can be a great change from making a film or any kind of digital media, which require significant technical knowledge and a team of specialists. But making a board game can be lead you down a rabbit-hole into a world of rich creative exploration and sophisticated design. Like the best games of any sort, making a board game is both easy to learn, and tough to master.

Board Game Jam is a low-barrier way to enter the world of gamemaking, and have fun doing it.

Check out Board Game Jam!

Gamers Solve AIDS Enzyme Puzzle

- Adam Clare

If you thought playing games was just for fun, well Foldit is a game that has people solve problems for science. That itself is pretty neat, but what pushes this one over the edge is that Foldit has brought some great results and fast!

Developed in 2008 by the University of Washington, it is a fun-for-purpose video game in which gamers, divided into competing groups, compete to unfold chains of amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — using a set of online tools.
To the astonishment of the scientists, the gamers produced an accurate model of the enzyme in just three weeks.
Cracking the enzyme “provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs,” says the study, referring to the lifeline medication against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
It is believed to be the first time that gamers have resolved a long-standing scientific problem.
“We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed,” Firas Khatib of the university’s biochemistry lab said in a press release.

Read the rest of the article.

Thanks Kathryn!

Scroll To Top