Phylo

This particular game is a different take on the traditional learning games, who seek to provide an interesting and engaging way for the user to understand often complex topics.  Phylo is a game which seeks to use the input of the game for real life scientific research, and falls under the category of games which have been coined ‘crowd-sourcing games’ and are designed to call upon the collective problem solving skills of the players to solve real world problems.

There has been a few success stories with crowd sourcing style games so far such as the games ‘Foldit’ and ‘EteRNA’.  The idea behind Foldit is to use outsourcing to help scientists to find the best way to fold complex proteins.  Proteins fold into particular shapes and there is a particular shape which will be the most stable and best for the function of the protein, with Foldit, the user will play around to fold the protein to a shape which is stable and of low energy and thus far the game has achieved some great successes thanks to the players.  For more information on Foldit, there is an information page here which also has a collection of publications on the successes of the game including that of protein structure solved by players which have had incredible contributions to science!

EteRNA similarly is designed to allow the users to design an RNA molecule and the most successful molecules as voted by the users will actually be synthesized in a real laboratory, with the players receiving information about the subsequent behaviour of the molecules.  

Figure 1 Alignment through puzzles.. image found here

Phylo is an interesting game, created by bioinformaticians it allows the user to actually help researchers through matching coloured blocks.  So in effective this game becomes a crowd-sourcing effort for researchers where DNA can be aligned and a phylogenetic tree can be created.  The game helps with a problem in sequence aligning where you are aligning several similar sequences in genes common to many species.  This is a frequent occurrence, a gene such as this  is a conserved gene and is usually an important gene for normal functioning of an organism (hence why it has become conserved).  Algorithms  are usually used in programs which are designed to align sequences however these can be prone to error.  This game should improve the sequence alignment.

In Phylo, the sequences are represented with a colour block for each of the four bases and the player has to find a matching sequence through moving the coloured blocks, the game starts with comparing of two organisms and eventually up to eight different organisms will be compared.

The difference between Foldit and EteRNA and the game under review here Phylo, is Foldit is actually designed to teach the player about molecular biology, in particular protein folding.  Likewise EteRNA has tutorials in order to teach the basics of RNA folding – and therefore places an importance on the educational concept of the game .  Whereas Phylo has avoided the educational route.  The educational benefit of this game is limited, the game requires no knowledge or learning curve and simply is designed to be a puzzle.  The point of this is to encourage more users as it is a project of crowd-sourcing and in this way regardless of knowledge help thousands of people are making a contribution to geneticists by playing.

On playing the game you first select from an option of diseases such as cancers, infectious diseases or heart and muscle  diseases.  Then you are presented with the blocks which you are to start moving, and a small phylogenetic tree is created on the side.

 In the gameplay the blocks should be moved to to create colour matches and increase the score.  The game shows your current score, the best score you have achieved so far in the level and the Par, which is the computers highest score.  There is penalties for for gaps and mismatches and bonus for matches.  As you progress, a phylogenetic tree will display on the left of the screen and this will tell the player which sequences should similarly align in priority.  This doesn't really require the  user to have much knowledge or learn much about phylogenetic trees, however, it does give a small introduction to understanding the concept of trees and their connection to alignment.

Although the game is not particularly educational, and more just a game which contributes to scientific research rather than teaching however, still worth a mention as it has been useful to science, in improving accuracy for alignments, which in turn can create more accurate phylogenetic trees.

In terms of improvements of a game like Phylo, it would have been nice to include a tutorial (even if it was optional) to offer players more information behind the science of sequence alignment and the importance of correct alignments leading to the discovery of evolutionary relationships and the design of accurate phylogenetic trees.  A far more advanced version of the game could be designed which would place a higher importance on the educational element and could even offer the opportunity for the users to actually create a phylogenetic tree with successful alignments.  The game offers no information about different species, another potential addition for a more comprehensive version of the game could be useful, maintaining the game as a crowd-sourcing game, but giving the educational edge as seen by other similar games.