How the game could help cure cancer

COn the game playing a game. Maybe one of them is in a room near you right now. You hear periodic explosions of anger and joy. They have been there for hours. These games can be easy to pick up, but they are certainly not easy to win. As the founder of Atari said, Nolan Bushnell, “The best games are easy to learn and difficult to master.”

What does humans keep us stuck to a game console for hours? An answer is evolving: we are resolvers of natural problems. This same reader continues to take advantage of us today. Scientists, for example, spend years mastering their areas – reducing tedious subsidies proposals, cultivating cells for hours and decades of sustainable training. Their persistence leads to better medicine, to better technology, to a better world.

Games exploit this advanced trend: they call on the old circuits in us that try to understand things. The game designers create a virtual realization mode of a kind of problem solving situation – removing an enemy, beating an opponent, reaching the upper level, unlocking a skill – and they facilitate easy and intuitive game. They attract you with easy victories and progress. But over time, it becomes more and more difficult, and at the end, to win, you have to put on a narrow path through the action space, just do good things, in the right order, to achieve your goal.

These remarkable parallels can be used with good and surprising, helping us to solve some of the most obstinate problems in medicine, such as cancer. Thousands of scientists from around the world work with diligence to progress in the treatment of cancer. What sequence of actions will lead to a better way to block this channel? How to detect this type of cell in the early stages? How can this tumor be targeted without harming the nearby healthy cells? Which treatment will work to eradicate the tumor without making it resistant to treatment? Scientists, like game players, have to put on an incredibly narrow path in action space, but the variables are more numerous, the issues are higher, and we don’t even know if there is one path at all.

The games call on the old circuits in us that strive to understand things.

Community science games are not like standard games, where designers know how the game players’ goals can be achieved. But it’s okay. Chess creators could not have dreamed of all the innovations that the game would inspire. The designers of PAC-Man and Donkey Kong did not even know what the highest possible scores were. As long as the game has clear conditions of success, everything else remains the same. We can create games where players try to solve problems that have never been resolved, using a defined set of tools to design something that has never been designed before.

Consider the following challenge: Build a LEGO bridge using a fixed set of parts to support a large weight. A condition for success has been defined, but it is not clear if success is achievable. This challenge was tried: in an episode of the television show Lego mastersThe teams were responsible for building bridges that could contain 1,000 pounds.

The idea is to explicitly place an unresolved problem linked to a common concern in the context of a challenge or a game. In fact, there is a long history of games and competitions for the public good. Modern canned and discrepancy techniques come from a reward offered during French revolutionary wars to anyone who could design a good way to preserve large quantities of food. In 1714, the British Parliament adopted “an act to ensure a public reward for a person or people who discovered longitude at sea”, establishing prices with payments linked to improvements in accuracy. The awards were paid for more than 100 years and the results had a lasting impact on the precision stopwatch.

In our time, we had computers, and it took the old idea of ​​a game for good or a “serious game” and completely transformed it. The entire field of modern science is available in game type interfaces in a few seconds to anyone interested. Games imply that community members solve problems related to almost all areas of science, the identification of celestial bodies (there are only so many human astronomers, and AI has its limits) to the transcription of ancient texts to find new ways of engineering of quantum computers.

The discovery of drugs is a particularly popular orientation for community science games. We have Eterna, Fouddit and Nanocofter. The three gamless the engineering process The types of molecules that manage our body. Each game has a slightly different mechanism. Foldit is a game similar to bonsai where you pull and twist the folds of a protein and see your score increase and go down.

Eterna is a discreet game more sudoku type, where a bit of RNA is represented as a colorful pearl chain. The players change the colors and once again, look at a score go up and down as they try to create an RNA molecule which makes specific things, like withdrawing in a way in the presence of a molecule but in another way in its absence. Nanocofter, now disappeared, was more an abstract puzzle game, in which DNA strands hid like puzzle pieces in a sequence of slowed chemical reactions, and the objective was to set up a path that ended in a specific DNA sequence.

Eterna and Folit are notable because they have led to real scientific discoveries that are currently used. An Eterna challenge (the “Openvaccine Challenge”) a few years ago asked game players to help design RNA molecules for COVVI-19 vaccines that do not require ultra-cold storage, allowing easier storage and transport, which is particularly crucial for developing parts of the world. Although the attribution is delicate, the challenge was a success; Vaccines coated today are more stable at room temperature than before.

There is no reason why we cannot go further, with an open problem, including cancer research. Think about it this way: cancer is not only a problem, but a giant tree of interconnected problems. Many of these problems could, at least in principle, be transformed into an open gamified challenge. There are thousands of problems related to cancer and there are thousands of approaches to the design of games and genres of games, so the potential is large. In addition, we have all the powerful tools and techniques of the design of games at our disposal, tools that did not exist on this scale even ten years ago.

I should be clear: it is not easy that this strategy will generally allow players to solve problems that professional scientists have not been able to solve (although this could happen, as in the example of cold viruses). But if they fail this mission, they could still succeed in other ways. These games teach players the biology and the functioning of the body – knowledge that could help them make more informed decisions about their health or to defend more effectively for others. Why not slide a little education? The unusual schedule of scientific problems in games could also lead scientists and others to think of the existing problems of new ways.

It is a stimulating thought: cancer is a terrible enemy, but we can fight it in a concrete way. Even without training in biology, you could have art or design skills, or simply be really good in games. This is enough to contribute. You can build new games that bring us closer to a remedy and make people a little smarter along the way.

This article is an extract from Game cancerreprinted with the permission of Press player.

Image of lead: Perfect_vecotors / Shutterstock

• Jeff Yoshimi

  Published on July 2, 2025

  Jeff Yoshimi is a professor and member of the founding faculty of the Cognitive Sciences and Information Department and the Department of Philosophy of the University of California in Merced. His areas of research include neural networks, the theory of dynamic systems, the philosophy of cognitive sciences and the visualization of complex processes. He is the author of Game cancer.