Researchers at the University of California are seeking to make gamers the next line of defense in the fight against malaria via a free Internet-based pattern recognition game that has players play “pick the infected blood cell.” Standard identification of an infection involves a trained researcher staring down the barrel of a microscope and counting the number of parasites visible in a slide; but since infected cells look different than healthy cells it’s an optical recognition problem and that can be done by almost anyone.

The process of identifying malaria-infected blood is extremely time consuming for developing nations; however, as we’ve seen demonstrated in the past, that while people will be more error-prone than an expert looking at a slide, a lot of people averaged together will successfully come close to a proper answer by allowing the errors to fall out when combining their answers. As a result, having unskilled gamers (across the globe) become part of the diagnosis could save a great deal of time in diagnosis a patient who has the disease so that they can get on anti-malarial drugs faster.

In an article in The Atlantic the process is described as thus:

Gamers begin with a short tutorial where they first learn the characteristics of an infected blood cell. Then, they’re presented with a six-by-eight grid of blood cells. The object of the game is to use one tool to neutralize bad cells and another to select all the remaining healthy cells. Once they’ve cleared a stage, players are given another grid to analyze.

According to citations on the project and a paper published on the endeavor [PDF], untrained students at UCLA capably diagnosed malarial blood cells with a 1.25 percent margin of trained pathologists. This could mean that crowdsourcing for certain projects may become a real, viable route to help ease pressures in developing nations for diagnosis. Imagine if the Amazon Mechanical Turk were plied for this sort of project (it has worked for Zappos.com and others.)

Video games are a powerful mechanism to draw and keep attention from us humans, after all we like to set goals and attain them. Gamification has been used in multiple markets, not just gaming, but it’s definitely a sign that there’s an untapped potential in the human-ability to game. In the past, we at SiliconANGLE have spoken with Amr Awadallah, CTO of Cloudera, about the untapped benefits of the “gaming-instinct” in humans.

Gamers produce a lot of data, he explained talking about Modern Warfare 3 from Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty series, and all of that data is logged and studied by gaming companies. That’s millions of man-hours a year of people doing things and it’s all entertainment—but if we could harness that instinct and that desire to compete and be part of a social experience as a culture, we could do great things. He went on to mention Stargate: Atlantis, a TV show in a popular science fiction series, where one character gained his place on a scientific mission by solving a mathematical puzzle in a video game.

With the rise of game-like crowdsourcing like the anti-malaria application, Foldit, and others we might be seeing a slow breakthrough of gaming-centric scientific breakthroughs. We’ve even seen augmented-reality combined with gaming used at McCormick School of Engineering in order to entice students to get better pictures of not-often-photographed locations.

The usefulness of crowdsourcing and using gamers to help in scientific discovery, especially if there’s an incentive or a social boon, could be outstanding. Using our interconnected Internet-enabled society to tap into the resources of millions of wired people, many of whom who might just be glad to escape the boredom on the road with a mobile device, might be the next-big-breakthrough in many different avenues of scientific inquiry or even hypersocial crowdsourced philanthropy.

A few minutes of picking malaria cells today might save the life of someone tomorrow.