Experigaming
Experigaming is Molecular Reality Corporation's word for experiments run as video games, in which the player's controls operate a real laboratory instrument and the events of the game are made from the instrument's measurements. The company's plan is for many players, each with a small nanopore sensor at home, to carry out one large experimental campaign without needing to be trained scientists. The word appears in the company's December 2022 technical overview, which predicted that its later instruments would be sold as "molecular PCs" and that "just as with PCs, 'experigaming' will be a major application."[1]
Origins
The 2022 overview gives two reasons that solid-state nanopore research had been slow: "hands-on ss-nanopore research is extremely tedious and expensive", and "strategic coordination rarely happens above the level of individual labs and companies." Its answer was "a nanopore hardware platform that's also a gaming console", meant to replace "the frustration of failed experiments with the fun and challenge involved in game play".[1] In the same document "each game they play represents one experiment within a much larger coordinated experimental campaign", and the players are "experimentalist-gamers".[1] Kemmish later tied the plan to what he calls dumb problems, the routine failures of nanopore work: "These 'dumb problems' of frontier solid-state nanopore research are precisely why making the MR devices as easy to use as toys is everything."[2]
The look of the hardware came from the arcade. The demonpore 64 console had "the general appearance and footprint of a classic 1980s gaming console" and a custom joystick, which the overview defends: "it may look silly at first, but if you've ever spent hours and hours doing hands-on experiments with solid state nanopores and the instruments that test them, staring at control software and fiddling with parameters like voltage and sampling rate, you'll immediately realize the value of a joystick."[1] The first molecular game the company coded was Spyke Hunter, named, Kemmish wrote, as "a pun on 'Spy Hunter' (a 1980s arcade game)". He added: "Maybe I don't always give things the best names?"[3] His public curriculum vitae describes the company's products as "nanopore-based molecular sensors marketed as gaming consoles".[4]
Design
In the scheme of 2022, the instrument control software and the game were one program, Maxine's Quest. The overview says that "in the very simplest case" the number of spikes, the brief changes in current caused by particles passing through the pore, would "determine how many enemies appear". The control panel had a bias knob for the voltage across the pore, a "zapper stick" that applies a brief spike of maximum voltage, switches that put a sawtooth on the voltage or a rapid oscillation on the syringe pump, a "potion platter" for telling the system which reagents had been added, and a screen called the Data TV that showed the live current.[1] Players were to be "rewarded based on the quantity and quality of data they collect", and results were to be written up as preprints "with author order corresponding to the leaderboard for top experimentalist-gamers".[1] One proposed game asked players to catch a particle in the pore and pass it back and forth by hand, an exercise in ping-pong sensing for "translocation profiles on the order of 100s of milliseconds".[1]
The 2026 version runs in a web browser. A relay turns the current from the company's amplifier into packets, about twenty a second, that include four "game signals", named danger, mana, spawn rate and stability, each scaled from 0 to 1. Spikes in the trace spawn monsters around a central pore, and the game's voltage knob and zapper are mapped to the instrument's controls.[5] When the player at the console reaches 1,000 points, the game announces "Slightly less successful"; a challenger who gets there first sees "You win!".[6] A design sketch for themed versions relabels the voltage knob "Sniff intensity" and the zap button "FLUSH".[5]
Comparable projects
In The Disclosure Crawl, the company's quiz dungeon, the correct answer to the boss's charge "Citizen science is GARBAGE IN, AI-HALLUCINATED GARBAGE OUT!" begins "Galaxy Zoo, Foldit, and eBird proved citizen science produces publishable results".[7] Players of Foldit, a protein-folding game, produced models that let crystallographers solve the structure of a retroviral protease in 2011.[8] In those projects the players work on data or simulations.
A few projects have let game input drive physical experiments, as experigaming proposes. Players of Eterna design RNA molecules on screen, and the most promising designs are synthesized and their folding measured in a laboratory, a setup its authors called "a massive open laboratory".[9] On November 30, 2016, about 100,000 people playing an online game produced 97,347,490 binary choices that set the measurement settings of 13 tests of local realism in 12 laboratories.[10] A group at Stanford University proposed "biotic games" in 2011, played with living microorganisms such as paramecia in microfluidic chambers.[11] See also citizen science.
Status
The home instruments that experigaming requires have not shipped. In May 2026 the company stated that "We are not ready to ship MR series Molecular Streaming Devices",[5] and in August 2026 its guide said it was "not currently recruiting new players".[12] Visitors can play Maxine's Quest against the current from the company's own bench through its live molecular stream. The company's volunteers, Player Scientists, earn experience points in a separate role-playing game, Epic Quest Bio, whose quests include 250 points for a proposal for a "(stupid + fun) virtual molecular game".[5]
The company has also written down the method's weak point. A plan for its data warns that a neural network trained on streamed sessions could learn "the operator's habits or the day's lab humidity" instead of the molecules, and requires each session used for training to record its instrument settings and a microscope video of the flow cell.[5]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Focused Ion Beam pore". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Sequencing a string". EQBio-OS.
- ^ "Stanley Kent Kemmish, Jr." Molecular Reality Corporation. May 2026.
- ^ a b c d e "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ Pixel Marchetti (June 2, 2026). "Maxine's Quest Review: The Monsters Are Real Current Spikes". Ludicious.
- ^ "Dungeons & Diligence: The Disclosure Crawl, Level 7: The Dragon's Lair". Molecular Reality Corporation. April 2026.
- ^ Khatib, Firas (2011). "Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players". Nature Structural & Molecular Biology 18: 1175-1177. doi:10.1038/nsmb.2119.
- ^ Lee, Jeehyung (2014). "RNA design rules from a massive open laboratory". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (6): 2122-2127. doi:10.1073/pnas.1313039111.
- ^ The BIG Bell Test Collaboration (2018). "Challenging local realism with human choices". Nature 557: 212-216. doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0085-3.
- ^ Riedel-Kruse, Ingmar H. (2011). "Design, engineering and utility of biotic games". Lab on a Chip 11 (1): 14-22. doi:10.1039/C0LC00399A.
- ^ "Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 2026.