Can Video Games make the world a better place? (Re-Mission and Folding@home)

 

Videogames get so maligned by the media and by certain members of society, and some of what people complain about are true. There are many games that offer very little to players and to society other than cheap thrills and excitement.

This is true of most forms of media though, and just like comics before it, the attacks on videogames often are led by people who are not involved in, don't understand, or care about the medium.

Today I start a new series that I hope can show the good the medium can do by focusing on Re-Mission, a game designed to help children fighting cancer, and Folding@home, an application for the PS3 that lets system owners help Stanford University map the process of protein folding- and could possibly lead to a cure for cancer.

Re-Mission was created in order to help inform children of how cancer treatment is helping to rid their bodies of cancer, and more importantly it is designed to give children a sense of control on the events surrounding them.

It is a third person shooter in which players guide an avatar through the human body in order to kill the cancer cells and other ailments that affect cancer patients.

Re-Mission is free to download off the Internet, and anyone interested can also order the game on CD or DVD. It is a stunning example of videogames being created not just to be entertaining, but also to help better the world.

Another great example of the good that can come from videogames in the folding@home program (folding.stanford.edu). Folding@home lets PS3 owners add the processing power of their system to Stanford Universities attempts to find cures for serious illnesses like cancer.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world.

Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

"Proteins are biology's workhorses — its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery."

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes."

In layman's terms Folding@home helps Stanford map the process of protein folding which, once understood, can lead to find ways to prevent negative forms of folding.

When you have your PS3 connected to the Folding@home application you see a map with lights all over the globe that represent people all over the world who are also using the application.

The screen also gives a representation of the protein the team is working on, and different facts about the progress and details of the study being performed.

Folding@home comes bundled and ready to be launched on every PS3 sold. Now that it not something you would see being done by people who are out to turn your children into walking zombies.

Videogames are a developing medium. Like many mediums are in their infancy, things are not often as deep and thoughtful as will be achieved in the future.

Still, just because there are many games out there that are not trying to be true art or to add more to society than just a good time, this does not mean that there is no good at all in videogames.

I would love to hear more about what good videogames have done or are doing, or any other ways that videogames are contributing to society. If you have any of these types of stories, post a comment here or post your own story with the title ‘Can Video Games Make The World A Better Place?’

To find out more about how video games are making the world a better place, read part two, Can Video Games Make the World a Better Place? Part 2: Creativity. You can find all entries in this series here.