Next month, the Serious Games Initiative will host its Games for Health conference. There will be sessions on epidemiology in World of Warcraft, Game Addicition, Nurse Training, Rehabitainment, and a special session with some of the biggest companies in healthcare. A schedule is available here.

One session that intrigues me is entitled, "Playing our Way to Better Drugs." It is a presentation of the Fold It! Project, which is described as "a massively distributed biochemistry game that will enable future key discoveries in molecular science." The project, developed out of a lab at the University of Washington, is based on the understanding that "practically all fundamental molecular design problems are about the geometric relationships of complex molecules." (Please don't ask me what this means exactly, but it has to do with how chains of amino acids fold up to form three-dimensional functional proteins.)

Fold It! casts

molecular folding problems as a massively distributed 3D puzzle game, and plan to enable players use their computers to discover the solutions to current open scientific problems, including cures for cancer, AIDS, and discovery of novel biofuels. The fundamental idea is to do user-assisted optimization for protein design by formulating and presenting this process as a competitive game played by thousands of people.

This description of the game evokes for me a number of ideas that relate to our concept of Open Health: open innovation, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, citizen science. Of course, we have also examined the role of games in health (the topic of our Spring 2007 pre-conference workshop), but not in the context of scientific research.

So why use a game format to find a cure for cancer?

[W]hen designed well, people will play it for a number of important reasons: it is fun (it looks like a fun 3D puzzle and not like some biochemistry textbook), it is addicting (we're employing several techniques from casual games to attract the widest possible demographic), it is competitive (getting a top score is a huge motivator), it is collaborative (they can work together in teams to solve a problem), and it has deep impact (players want to get credit for the drug that cures cancer).

I won't be attending the Games for Health conference, but I look forward to hearing more about the Fold It! Project as it . . . unfolds. (Sorry, but that bad pun was intended.)