I played The Cure game for my citizen science assignment. The purpose of the game was to help develop our understanding of different types of cancer. To my understanding, they create games to help do studies for various cancers. Currently, they are focused on further understanding breast cancer. The way the game works, is a bunch of cards labeled with the name of genes were displayed, and a robot and I took turns in picking cards. The one with the higher score ends up winning. The scoring basis is determined based on how the genes picked are related to breast cancer.

The whole game felt very esoteric. They always gave a description of the gene, but I was not knowledgeable enough in breast cancer to make educated choices. It more so felt like I was guessing, due to the fact that I had no knowledge about breast cancer. Through random guessing however, I was able to complete all the levels, and upon its completion a few thing about this game became clear. When you were giving a score, a tree was shown on how many people had a reappearance of cancer with the gene. The more complex this tree became, the higher score you received. Even though this became apparent, it was much more difficult to actually accomplish this. This only occurred when I was very lucky or when the computer made all the right choices. Overall I felt that the experience was pretty pointless for me. On occasion it is better to have humans to a certain job, but since my knowledge about the topic is insufficient, it would be much better to have a computer running every single combination.

The game itself was very interesting due to the fact that all the results were based on actual events that occurred in humans that had breast cancer. I did feel pretty useless to their cause due to my lack of knowledge, however. Since the computer records my results and compares investigates it later it would most definitely be much more effective for them to have computers do all the matching. Since a computer would avoid repeats, it would be much more successful with this task. I would definitely make this game more available to those who have more knowledge about breast cancer. Those people would definitely be able to have greater impact in the research than the average person. Still, I am sure that they are going to make great progress in cancer research with this kind of game.