Ten simple rules to create a serious game, illustrated with examples from structural biology

Marc Baaden (1) , Olivier Delalande (2) , Nicolas Ferey (3, 4) , Samuela Pasquali (5) , Jérôme Waldispühl (6) , Antoine Taly (1)

1 LBT (UPR_9080) - Laboratoire de biochimie théorique [Paris]
2 IGDR - Institut de Génétique et Développement de Rennes
3 VENISE - Virtual & augmented ENvIronments for Simulation & Experiments
4 LIMSI - Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur
5 LCRB - UMR 8015 - Laboratoire de cristallographie et RMN biologiques
6 McGill University = Université McGill [Montréal, Canada]

Serious scientific games are games whose purpose is not just fun. In the field of science, the serious goals include crucial activities for scientists: outreach, teaching and research. The number of serious games is increasing rapidly, in particular citizen science games (CSGs), games that allow people to produce and/or analyze scientific data. It is possible to build a set of rules providing a guideline to create or improve serious games. We present arguments gathered from our own experience (Phylo, DocMolecules, the HiRE-RNA contest and Pangu) as well as examples from the growing literature on scientific serious games.

Domains: Life Sciences [q-bio]; Genetics

Marc Baaden, Olivier Delalande, Nicolas Ferey, Samuela Pasquali, Jérôme Waldispühl, et al.. Ten simple rules to create a serious game, illustrated with examples from structural biology. PLoS Computational Biology, 2018, 14 (3), pp.e1005955. ⟨10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005955⟩. ⟨hal-01744190⟩