EVE Online Gamers Tackle Flow Cytometry Data in Space

Video games give players a chance to step outside everyday life and immerse themselves in entirely different worlds. As their popularity has grown, so has their potential to serve purposes beyond entertainment.

Jérôme Waldispühl, a computational biologist at McGill University, has a job many would envy: He explores how to embed computation into mini video games to solve scientific problems. One example is solving the multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem. MSA is a process that aligns similar DNA or protein sequences to reveal evolutionary relationships and build phylogenetic trees; however, automated methods, while fast, can produce suboptimal alignments.

In 2010, his team launched Phylo, a gamified platform for citizen scientists to manipulate patterns consisting of colored shapes, which represented sequence alignments, to improve MSA accuracy.¹ While this online approach was successful and continues today, Waldispühl wanted to move beyond MSA to explore other scientific problems. This would require a new strategy to sustain long-term player engagement.

Leveling Up Citizen Science with Gamers

To explore this possibility, Waldispühl reached out to Attila Szantner, founder and chief executive officer of Massively Multiplayer Online Science, which brings crowd-sourced science into video games and taps into large online communities. Their collaboration raised a compelling question: What other scientific problems could benefit from being embedded into video games?

In 2016, Szantner approached Crowd Control Productions (CCP) Games, the studio behind EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game where players—known as capsuleers—forge their own paths through a sprawling science fiction universe.

“I knew about EVE Online as a super unique, strange beast in the video game industry." It was a game with sci-fi lore and a science-loving community. "So, it seemed to be really the perfect match for [a citizen science initiative]. Luckily, CCP also fell in love with the idea,” said Szantner.

That idea became Project Discovery, which is a mini game integrated into the players’ in-game menu. It is designed with specific research tasks and real datasets. In its first two phases, the team focused on different projects to present to the capsuleers. Players have contributed to more than 25 million classifications of microscopy images of human cells to the Human Protein Atlas and analyzed the light curves of stars using astronomical data to discover new exoplanets.

Bringing Flow Cytometry to the EVE Online Universe

A new phase began in 2020, when Ryan Brinkman, a bioinformatics researcher and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, connected with Waldispühl. “I brought the problem of flow cytometry to EVE Online,” said Brinkman. The process of gating, or defining cell groups, is manual, time-consuming, and often subjective even among experts.

To address the analytical bottleneck and improve reproducibility, the team once again turned to EVE Online’s capsuleers. With COVID-19 dominating global attention in 2020, Project Discovery introduced flow cytometry datasets into the game. Players grouped blood cell populations using in-game tracing tools, helping scientists understand how immune cells change during infection. Participants also received in-game rewards for their contributions.

Then in 2024, EVE Online announced that the scope expanded to include critical immune system diseases, including cancer. The team added new visualizations, such as X/Y axis density curves to increase the quality of player results.

“The community is very much interested and enthusiastic about this [work].” Szantner said. The EVE Online community has been supportive and has a strong interest in science.

A Decade of EVE Online Players, Data, and Discovery

Across four phases, participation in Project Discovery within EVE Online has remained steady. “By structure, Project Discovery is something quite unique as it really creates this community of players that are constantly contributing…it’s quite amazing,” said Waldispühl. One reason for its longevity, Brinkman noted, was the sheer volume of available public data—an unusual challenge in citizen science. Since 2020, more than 900,000 players have contributed to the flow cytometry project and the data helped train a machine learning algorithm to automate gating.²

As EVE Online approaches the 10-year milestone of Project Discovery, the initiative stands as a striking example of how virtual worlds and their citizen scientist inhabitants can generate real-world scientific impact. Looking ahead, the team aims to expand the platform into a comprehensive reference map while taking on an even broader range of biological research challenges.

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