Citizen science video games are designed primarily for users already inclined to contribute to science, which severely limits their accessibility for an estimated community of 3 billion gamers worldwide. We created Borderlands Science (BLS), a citizen science activity that is seamlessly integrated within a popular commercial video game played by tens of millions of gamers. This integration is facilitated by a novel game-first design of citizen science games, in which the game design aspect has the highest priority, and a suitable task is then mapped to the game design. BLS crowdsources a multiple alignment task of 1 million 16S ribosomal RNA sequences obtained from human microbiome studies. Since its initial release on 7 April 2020, over 4 million players have solved more than 135 million science puzzles, a task unsolvable by a single individual. Leveraging these results, we show that our multiple sequence alignment simultaneously improves microbial phylogeny estimations and UniFrac effect sizes compared to state-of-the-art computational methods. This achievement demonstrates that hyper-gamified scientific tasks attract massive crowds of contributors and offers invaluable resources to the scientific community.

公民科学视频游戏主要是为那些已经愿意为科学做出贡献的用户而设计的，这严重限制了全球估计有 30 亿游戏玩家的社区的可玩性。我们创建了无主之地科学( BLS )，这是一项公民科学活动，无缝集成到数千万游戏玩家玩的流行商业视频游戏中。这种集成是通过公民科学游戏的新颖的游戏优先设计来促进的，其中游戏设计方面具有最高优先级，然后将合适的任务映射到游戏设计。BLS众包了从人类微生物组研究中获得的 100 万条 16S 核糖体 RNA 序列的多重比对任务。自 2020 年 4 月 7 日首次发布以来，已有超过 400 万玩家解决了超过 1.35 亿个科学谜题，这是一个个人无法解决的任务。利用这些结果，我们表明，与最先进的计算方法相比，我们的多序列比对同时改善了微生物系统发育估计和 UniFrac 效应大小。这一成就表明，超级游戏化的科学任务吸引了大量的贡献者，并为科学界提供了宝贵的资源。