Borderlands Science

Borderlands Science is a puzzle game placed inside Borderlands 3, a commercial first-person shooter released by Gearbox Software in 2019, in which players help line up the genetic sequences of bacteria from the human gut. It was added to the game on April 7, 2020, and ran until October 2023.^[1] Its makers reported that more than 4 million players solved more than 135 million puzzles, and that the resulting alignment of a million sequences improved estimates of how the bacteria are related compared with the best computer methods.^[2]

Many studies of the microbiome identify bacteria by one gene, the 16S ribosomal RNA gene, which every bacterium carries and which changes slowly enough over evolution that distant species can be compared by it. To compare sequences they must first be aligned, written one above another with gaps inserted so that corresponding positions fall in the same column. For two sequences this is routine. For a million at once it is a hard computational problem, and programs settle for approximations that a person looking at the pattern can sometimes improve.

The puzzle came from the laboratory of Jérôme Waldispühl at McGill University in Montreal, whose group had built an earlier alignment game, Phylo, which put sequences on screen as rows of colored blocks.^[3] The sequences came from human gut samples studied by Rob Knight's group at the University of California, San Diego, through the Microsetta Initiative, Massively Multiplayer Online Science, a Swiss company co-founded by Attila Szantner that places research tasks in commercial games, was the third partner.

Games like Phylo reach people who already want to help science. The team's paper of 2024 starts from that limit: such games are made "primarily for users already inclined to contribute to science", while there are "an estimated community of 3 billion gamers worldwide". Its answer was what it called a "game-first design", "in which the game design aspect has the highest priority, and a suitable task is then mapped to the game design".^[2]

In the game, the puzzle is an arcade machine on the player's spaceship. The sequences appear as columns of colored tiles, one tile to a nucleotide, and the player inserts gaps to bring tiles of the same color into line. A score above a minimum flags the arrangement for the researchers. The rewards stayed inside the game: special skins for characters and boosters, for a limited time, to the loot the shooter drops.^[1]

The paper was published online on April 15, 2024. Among its authors, after the scientists and the game's developers, it lists "Borderlands Science players".^[2]

A set of answers that Molecular Reality Corporation wrote in 2024 for its mascot, Keltar, took the question "How does this compare to the Borderlands game/Folditathome/EteRNA and other gamified citizen science projects?" The question names the commercial game first, ahead of Foldit and EteRNA. The answer described Maxine's Quest as a way to make the drudgery of collecting data with purpose-built devices more pleasant.^[4]

Borderlands Science hides a laboratory task inside a game made for fun. The company's version of experigaming proposes the opposite construction, a laboratory instrument made to look like a game console. One of its 2026 slogans is "Biopopulism: advanced scientific instruments disguised as toys", a line that also appears on a painted poster from the years when the company was called demonpore, inc.^[4][a] In Borderlands 3 the players are given the data. In the company's plan they produce it, from samples run through a nanopore on the console.

• Citizen science
• Player Scientist