Eve Online: Helping The Scientific Community

Who would have ever thought that playing online games can help scientific and medical research? For players with a knack for science and anatomy, or for those who just love solving stuff for its own sake, Eve Online’s creators, CCP Games, and The Human Protein Atlas have teamed up for an important program to get some much-needed–crowd-sourcing help from gamers, and you (yes, YOU!) can help them with the research in the guise of a new game feature called Project Discovery

In Project Discovery, players take on the role of “capsuleers” tasked with analyzing images from a laboratory. Once players graduate from training, they are given increasingly difficult tasks which already have solutions they then move on to tasks that don’t have solutions. Once, enough capsuleers have reached agreed on the same solution player will then receive ISK and LP. They will also receive a boost to their Discovery accuracy rating and Analysis Points to increase their Discovery Rank.

This feature is currently available on test servers but will be implemented in the live game on January 28.

Check out EVE Online’s official forums for more information.