Here we go: https://getsatisfaction.com/eternagam…
Feedback would be much appreciated!
Excellent essay, LFP6. I think your comments present the core issue with Eterna. I have reached the stage where I can plug in a pattern that works and slog through the puzzles. I have no idea how to advance to the lab. The instructions etc. on the lab are, to me, confusing, not very helpful, or simply non-existent. I really like this game/idea/process and would love to continue, but I am stuck. If some of the talented folks who participate in the lab could make a series of tutorials that explained the basics of the lab, I think you would have a lot more participants. As of now, the game promises a lot more than it delivers. You don’t learn much about RNA design, only how to solve an abstract puzzle with four colored dots and some fairly simple guidelines. Eterna is a great idea, but until a better gateway to the lab is designed, it will attract far fewer participants than this excellent concept deserves.
@MoabUtah: please do not take anything I’m going to say personally, I’m only trying to address some points you made, because they seem to be quite common misconceptions (probably something the dev team needs to work on in terms of communication and PR)
As of now, the game promises a lot more than it delivers
To the contrary, the “game” delivers exactly what it promises. I’m not exactly sure where the misunderstanding comes from. Possibly, it has to do with the fact that most, if not all other citizen science projects are initiated by scientists asking for help from the public. In all these cases, the scientific community needs resources that are difficult to acquire, like huge amounts of CPU time, or data acquisition around the globe, or the classification of the millions of pictures of galaxies collected by some telescopes, etc.
Eterna players are not just better random sequence generators than computers are though. And the Das Lab and Greenleaf Lab are not asking for our “help” in the lab area of the game. They have invited us players to be the scientists. And being a scientist is not a matter of education or diplomas, neither does it consist only in applying a method (even though that’s important), it’s a state of mind, a philosophy.
You don’t learn much about RNA design
We, players, are not asked to learn it. Learning it would mean that someone else already knows the topic well enough to teach it. We are cordially invited to discover it and/or to invent it.
It already happened in the past with efforts centered around single states design, which culminated with the construction of the EternaBot and a scientific publication in the PNAS journal. We did it!
And we’re working now on even tougher problems centered around riboswitches, an ambitious objective with very far reaching potentials (like designing medically relevant molecules)
If some of the talented folks who participate in the lab could make a series of tutorials that explained the basics of the lab,
Let me ask you: how do you think the “talented” folks got where they are? Don’t you see the flurry of contributions from players like Eli Fisker in this forum? Have you cared to check his Eterna profile and the gigantic number of references he has meticulously classified? ever visited his Youtube channel full of introductory material about nucleic acids and science in general? Did you check the wiki? (old joke: yes, we have one). Ever bothered to check my own wiki blog? or any of the recorded online sessions I did in the past? Did you, just like Brourd, Eli, jandersonlee, Omei, etc (sorry for the many I forgot to list here) look yourself for information online? I’ve read easily 100+ scientific papers about RNA since I joined Eterna. I’m not saying everyone should do the same, but there is no excuses for finding no information, it’s out there, within Eterna and outside of it.
And if you now tell me “this is just nuts”, I’ll say “yes!!!”. This challenge is among the hardest there are, and in my opinion, this is exactly why this is so fascinating, so exhilarating and so unique. Where else do you, as a non-scientist, get indirect access to a wet lab and get the opportunity to do all of the science (hypothesis, experiment, analysis, peer review, publication)? Eterna is not “citizen science”, or at least, not in the usual sense, It is much more than a simple appeal to the public to do something good because it is the “duty” of decent and generous members of society (I suppose that this is what the “citizen” bit refers to). The dream of the founders of Eterna is, and has always been the crowdsourcing of science. Not just data acquisition or classification, all of it. The whole scientific process done by the whole crowd, scientists and the public together.
Finally, if for some reason you cannot or don’t want to contribute in the fashion described above, it’s absolutely fine, really, there are still plenty (plenty!) other things that can be done for Eterna. In essence, I did put aside my own scientific interests, at least a little, for the good of the project and the community. Someone had to help with coding in the Flash applet, so I did. If anyone has programming skills, they can contact Omei, jnicol and me, we have plenty of tasks waiting to be coded: scripted tools and boosters, data visualization, etc. If you are talented with video-editing, please get in touch with Ben. If you simply have time, give Ben some feedback on the new puzzle tutorials when he will request it. Good at solving puzzles and writing? Make tutorials, guides, walkthroughs, etc. and get in touch with LFP6 who’s been admirable in his dedication to reorganizing all sorts of materials here on GetSat and wants to tackle the wiki as well. Knowledgeable about game design and/or gamification? Contact Ben and Rhiju. Etc, etc. There is just no way to get bored here.
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@MoabUtah: We could really use help in testing the puzzle progression. If you’re interested, please contact me and we can set up a time. I’m not sure what level you’re at, but it would be great to have some more experienced players check that the puzzles are useful, that the messages and images convey the right concepts, etc. The most important part of improving the learning progression (or ramp to the lab, or however you want to think about it) is to get people to test it and tell us where things are going wrong. So please, get in touch - I’d love to talk to you (and anyone else who is interested) about it!
With a project like this one, there is always going to be a frontier. In some cases players ask for how to best design X thing, and in many cases the answer is simply: we don’t know (yet). So we’re kind of all in this adventure together. A lot depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go.
That being said, I think there are vast improvements to be made in teaching everyone what we do know. Getting someone who knows nothing about physics, microbiology, or RNA (AKA: me) to participate meaningfully in the current labs is a huge, huge challenge. But we are trying our best to improve this process, especially over the next few months.
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Nando,
Thanks for taking the time and effort to post such a detailed reply.
I will contact bekeep and see if there is something I could add to his development of the puzzle progression.
MoabUtah
I hadn’t been following this thread for awhile, but the recent activity caught my attention and prompted a new thought.
So far, we’ve been thinking in terms of getting players ready for full participation in EteRNA Medicine means getting them ready to create new lab designs. This is quite a high bar, as I think we are just beginning to really appreciate.
What if the entry level lab player didn’t get to create totally new lab designs? Instead, their initial capabilities would be limited to making some number of mutations to one or more “model” designs that had either scored relatively well in a prior round or, in the case of the first round for a puzzle, had been constructed by seasoned players based on their best guess of what will work for the new lab. The ability to create completely new designs would come with some combination of experience and/or success in creating design modifications.
I imagine a number of advantages.
- It is a much easier task to make small modifications to a switch than to construct one from scratch, raising player participation.
- The new player is much, much more likely to get a rewarding score than if they submit a de nova design, raising player satisfaction.
- The tutorials could focus on things like interpreting the lab data (i.e. what do the KD values actually mean, and how can a player use that data to guide one’s modifications), raising player understanding of the science.
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For points 1 and 2, I don’t particularly agree with this line of reasoning, given this would be relegating players to the job of rudimentary algorithms for the purpose of score inflation.
However, considering that the targets for labs are going to slowly become more and more complicated, it will probably be necessary to incorporate this into the game, but I would suggest that players be given more than just designs that have scored “relatively well.” They should be given a design from within the pool of synthesized designs and be asked to improve on it given their understanding of the experimental result, with the option to skip designs if it is particularly terrible or not well made.
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Good point. I hadn’t given any thought to what constituted scoring “relatively well”, but there’s no reason to limit the criteria for selection to the score alone.
Thanks, Omei. I think that’s a very good way of introducing players to the lab and teaching them about good designs. I definitely plan on incorporating modding in the progression.
Fair points, Brourd. Would a player have an idea of where to improve on the basis of a score of one design? Or would they look at some group or pool of scores, get a design from the pool and try to improve it on based on their understanding of the trends in the results?
I definitely think that focusing both the learning and the gameplay on analysis would be helpful, personally, as it seems to me that without this the player can neither improve well or make use of what others have done.
Hi Everyone!
We’re moving forward on the tuberculosis challenge and a piece of that is the new puzzle progression which will help us all prepare to develop molecules for tuberculosis diagnosis. We’re still working on a few things, but we’d really love your feedback on the latest iteration.
You can see the new site here: medicine.eternadev.org
Let us know:
- What you think of the newer, simplified look
- If there are any hints to puzzles that don’t make sense
- If there are puzzles that seem to difficult to solve (I’m particularly interested in the last dozen or so puzzles)
- If there is content that you would like to see on some of the mission accomplished screens
- If there is mission accomplished screen content that doesn’t make sense in context
- If there are any technical issues (loading times, broken links, other problems)
Note:
- Some of the earlier puzzles don’t have hints but we haven’t gotten rid of the hint functionality for those puzzles yet
- Hints for switch puzzles haven’t been implemented yet
- The last dozen or so puzzles are awaiting some mission accomplished screen updates
- We’ll be crediting individual players for the puzzles and design templates that we use in the progression
A whole lot of credit goes to Caleb and Nando. If you experience technical problems with the puzzle or with the site you can contact Caleb directly at calebgeniesse [at] gmail [dot] com. For bug reports, but as specific as possible (browser information and screenshots are helpful). For other issues contact me.
Best,
Ben
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Here’s a list of the mission screens with the puzzle id in the corner to use for reference. Thanks!
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1msi6-Obi8udx_53M_PUYWRt90WsPo2aMAhHFAONeReQ/edit?usp=sharing
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Ok, I’ve been going through this whole thing with a brand-new account. I have quite a bit of feedback to share, but I’m going to wait until I finish. 
With the day off tomorrow, hopefully I can do that! Thank you all so much for all the hard work you put into this, this is a huge step in the right direction for EteRNA.
Great! Thanks!
I’ve done quite a bit of the new progression and think, in general, it is very helpful. I also have some comments that I will add after I finish.
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I’m getting hung up on [PUZPROG] [SWITCH2.5][2 STATES] CAU . It gets to the “submitting design” and just hangs up there.
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Great - thanks for you help! Hmm… I’ll look into the problem this afternoon. Appreciate the report.
It seems like the puzzles are loading normally now. Can you try clearing your cache and trying again? Please let us know if it still doesn’t work (and if you can let us know what browser you’re using), that’d be great. Thanks!
Question–Is there an assumption that people have done the Nova tutorials? Thanks.
No - there’s no assumption that they’ve done the Nova tutorials.