Can playing computer games actually be useful?

Playing computer games gets a bad press. It's bad for your eyesight prevents young people from developing normal social relationships, encourages inactivity and therefore obesity. Not to mention that certain games are said to encourage dangerous and violent behaviour.

Today a group of techies joined together to consider a project that could do a lot to change this negative view.

http://blogs.nature.com/spoonful/files/2012/04/foldit-pic.png

The big idea; Could people playing a computer game be used to find a cure for cancer?

Forty of the best computer programmers from Facebook, Google, Amazon and Citizen Science Alliance have gathered together this weekend in an attempt to design an App that could be used to cure cancer. The project led by Cancer Research is focussing the minds of these talented people to investigate the possibility of producing a game that as playing it the users are actually analysing the vast amount of gene data that if understood may lead to clues relating to the causes and prevention of cancer.

This type of crowd-sourcing is nothing new. Scientists have used computer program's run by the public to analyse data for years, a good example is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) that uses the downtime on computers across the world to analyse radio signals to look for the next 'WOW' signal. A computer game called fold-it also exists where the players solve puzzles that help the scientists to understand how polypeptides fold into complex proteins.

So maybe after this weekend these techies will have designed a computer game that could actually do some good for the world.

I hope they release it on the X-box.

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