Design, engineering and utility of biotic games
Abstract
Games are a significant and defining part of human culture, and their utility beyond pure entertainment has been demonstrated with so-called 'serious games'. Biotechnology – despite its recent advancements – has had no impact on gaming yet. Here we propose the concept of 'biotic games', i.e., games that operate on biological processes. Utilizing a variety of biological processes we designed and tested a collection of games: 'Enlightenment', 'Ciliaball', 'PAC-mecium', 'Microbash', 'Biotic Pinball', 'POND PONG', 'PolymerRace', and 'The Prisoner's Smellemma'. We found that biotic games exhibit unique features compared to existing game modalities, such as utilizing biological noise, providing a real-life experience rather than virtual reality, and integrating the chemical senses into play. Analogous to video games, biotic games could have significant conceptual and cost-reducing effects on biotechnology and eventually healthcare; enable volunteers to participate in crowd-sourcing to support medical research; and educate society at large to support personal medical decisions and the public discourse on bio-related issues.
Additional Information
© 2011 Royal Society of Chemistry. Received 11th September 2010, Accepted 23rd September 2010. Author contribution and order: IHRK conceived the project and wrote the paper. All authors contributed ideas and participated in game testing, with primary contributions: AMC developed flash code Fig.1h–l; BD and BCL developed setup Fig. 1c–g; ALH carried out experiments Fig. 2 and 3; IHRK contributed to all experiments, developed set-up Fig. 1m–o. First author highest contribution, other authors ordered alphabetically by last name. We would like to thank the Elowitz, Fraser, and Laurent labs at Caltech and the Clandinin and Dolmetsch labs at Stanford for generously sharing equipment and reagents. We are particularly grateful in various ways to Long Cai, Tom Clandinin, Rhiju Das, Franz Ferdinand, David Koos, Jeffrey Tsao, Henry Lowood, Alexey Pajitnov, Stephen Quake, Daniel Schwartz, and Adrien Trieulle as well as members of the Stanford Bioengineering department. This work was supported by the Beckman, Powell, and R & P Anderson foundations. We apologize to authors who were not cited for space constraints. We dedicate this work to Martin Gardner (1914–2010).Attached Files
Published - RiedelKruse2011p12326Lab_on_a_Chip.pdf
Supplemental Material - RIEDEL-KRUSEC01C00399AESIMOVIE1.MP4
Supplemental Material - RIEDEL-KRUSEC01C00399AESIMOVIE2.MP4
Supplemental Material - RIEDEL-KRUSEC01C00399AESIMOVIE3.MP4
Files
Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 21700
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20110111-113704511
- Beckman Foundation
- Powell Foundation
- R & P Anderson Foundation
- Created
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2011-01-28Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field