Play Games Using Live Cells

Greg Tito

PR for Dungeons & Dragons
Sep 29, 2005
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Play Games Using Live Cells


To increase interest in biology, scientists designed games that you can play with living organisms like PAC-mecium, Biotic Pinball, POND PONG and Ciliaball.

Ingmar Riedel-Kruse, a physicist from Stanford University, leads a team working on "biotic games." These games allow players to manipulate microscopic organisms on a molecular level in real time so that it feels as responsive and fun as simple videogames. PAC-mecium, for example, has you guiding single-celled paramecium to gobble up little balls by changing the polarity of an electrical field, while in Biotic Pinball you inject a blast of chemicals to force the paramecium to swim in a certain direction. Riedel-Kruse's team hopes that people who play these games with a simple game controller will become fascinated with the biological processes at work and want to learn more.

"We hope that by playing games involving biology of a scale too small to see with the naked eye, people will realize how amazing these processes are and they'll get curious and want to know more," Riedel-Kruse said.

In addition, the team hopes that one day real experiments can be designed to be run in this game-like environment to aid in "crowd-sourcing" scientific work. "We are also thinking perhaps we could have people running real experiments as they play these games," he said. "That is something to figure out for the future, what are good research problems which a lay person could really be involved in and make substantial contributions."

The biotic games are played by taking microscope images and graphically imposing a game board on top of them while a CPU interprets the paramecium movements and keeps score. Because of the simple setup, Riedel-Kruse's team was limited to mimicking simple videogames but he's interested to see what the scientific and game design communities might do with these ideas.

"We would argue that modern biotechnology will influence our life at an accelerating pace, most prominently in the personal biomedical choices that we will be faced with more and more often," Riedel-Kruse said. "Therefore everyone should have sufficient knowledge about the basics of biomedicine and biotechnology. Biotic games could promote that."

Source: Science Daily [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110114100955.htm]

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Twilight.falls

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Jun 7, 2010
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*Drinks Kaja'cola*
I've got it! Organic video games!

This has to be one of the most bizarre, yet strangely fascinating ideas I've ever heard of.
 

xDHxD148L0

The Dissapointed Gamer
Apr 16, 2009
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Looks neat enough, but once you get past first impressions the games themselves don't look that fun >.<
 

omicron1

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Mar 26, 2008
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Hmm...

Next up: Sonic the Hedgehog!

And after that, Warcraft: Apes VS Humans.

So many fun/amusing ideas come out of this. Do I ever think it'll be a useful technology for videogames? No - but it's interesting.
 

Kakashi on crack

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Aug 5, 2009
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The idea, in theory, is really cool and all. Biologists could set up courses for gamers to use, so that they can gather information. In theory, this idea is revolutional, it would be awsome, and a great breakthrough.

In theory.

In practice though, there's no limitations to what this technology could hold in store. I know this sounds far fetched, but at the rate technology advances whats not to say in say... 20 years we will be able to control monkeys with this technology, or even humans?

I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I'm just saying that everything has a good effect, and bad effect to it, and this looks like, in practice, it could one day be a terrorist device or military application. People could, while mentally have control over themselves, physically be doing something against their will.
 

OceanRunner

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Mar 18, 2009
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With current gaming tech as it is, this "Bionic Games" buissness seems like a waste of time and resources. They should be helping cure diseases or something instead of making what are essentialy games that have been outdated since the early 90's.
 

messy

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Dec 3, 2008
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This is so cool

OceanRunner said:
With current gaming tech as it is, this "Bionic Games" buissness seems like a waste of time and resources. They should be helping cure diseases or something instead of making what are essentialy games that have been outdated since the early 90's.
The technology is being used to control micro organisms by a shift in electrical potential or using chemicals to taxi the cells where you want them. This involves a fair bit of knowledge of a single cells signalling pathways. Whose to say this level of control won't help cure disease, especially since a lot of disease are only dangerous if they interact with the correct cells (due to binding sites of the cell surface), perhaps this could be used to lure cells away from the disease vulnerable tissues?

Just the knowledge generated can be applied to other research, a large number of anti-biotics used involve interrupting the signalling pathways these games are based on.