Elizabeth Newbury:
Welcome to another video from the Serious Games Initiative. As you may already know, the Serious Games Initiative is celebrating 20 years of developing and researching games as a means for social good, particularly in our case for policy education and outreach. Throughout the decades, our approach has focused on amplifying both science policy discourse and public policy discourse through the engaging medium of games with titles like the Fiscal Ship and Budget hero, which focused on the federal budget, and also our latest games, which are about the plastic pollution crisis called the Plastic Pipeline and AI's anatomy, as well as another couple of other AI based games, because AI seems to be a hot topic right now, right Dave? We also support the broader field of practice through a lot of our efforts, we put together this particular interview series to talk to leaders in the field of serious games, to understand both the past, the present and the future of the field, to sort of understand where we've been and where we're going, and how serious games can get us there. I'm joined here today by Dave Miller from NCI. And actually, Dave, do you mind introducing yourself a little bit and how you orient towards the field of serious games?
David Miller:
Sure, I'm Dave Miller. I'm a program director here at the National Cancer Institute, which is one of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health. Sort of like main portfolio that I work on is software development, generally for creating mathematical models and data analysis tools that enable cancer biology research so that can be anything from data visualization to the computational core and methods that underlie software to the actual software implementations themselves that researchers at companies and various institutions develop for people to use to identify new cures, new treatments and new biology that contributes to American health.
Elizabeth Newbury:
Are there any game titles that you've been involved with that we might know?
David Miller:
Yeah. So the most notable ones are probably Eyewire, Foldit, which is a protein folding game, and the Eterna, which is an RNA design game for developing sort of small switches and small micro RNAs that can be used for various aspects of biomedical research, but also a number of smaller ones as well that have been used sort of more in academic settings, but still incorporate sort of a game play and crowdsourcing approach like Cancer Crusade, which team at Moffitt Cancer Center partnered with a game development company to investigate how different approaches to treatment can impact a patient population or individual patients based on their particular you know, uh, features of their particular.
Elizabeth Newbury:
Yeah, so, and a lot of what ties all those initiatives together is they're really either showcasing research or including people in the research process.
David Miller:
Absolutely, all four of those that I mentioned, uh, incorporate a crowdsourcing approach. So that's where, you know, a centralized game is developed and has sort of a computational pipeline underneath it that's based in, you know, computational and biomedical research. But perhaps the interface is more of a game like interface, story based, interface in which people can the public and contribute their skill and expertise and creativity, predominantly toward doing some analysis of an image. So, you know a picture of a cell, and a tissue image, and you select a number of cells that have some certain quantity, or you make a summary of what you see. Eyewire is an exciting one, in that people are doing sort of brain connectomics. So you're tracing neurons throughout a whole stack of images, which certainly, until recently, it was a very difficult task for AI to perform, and increasingly, the analysis done by the crowd is used to improve those AI methodologies. So it's the sort of systems biology approach as well, where you know one method feeds into the lab, which new discoveries are made, that feeds back to the computational methods, which also improve and then drive new analyzes and edge cases that are needed to be done by the crowdsourcing community.
Elizabeth Newbury:
That's amazing. That's a interesting way to engage people is through games. And you've been in this field for a little while now. I don't want to reveal a number, but can you describe, since you like, in the past and how, what sort of the spark of using games in this particular arena was?
David Miller:
Well, I entered the space in 2013 so this had, you know, a long history even before that, for serious games of various types. I think the exciting piece that has evolved since I started is the sort of public engagement with these tools right at various levels, there's obviously the larger celebrated games and software tools that I mentioned, but there's also smaller tools and also additional opportunities that arise. You know, there's a lot of different types of informatics and analysis software that are created in academic settings, and you know, sometimes they're meant for students, or they're meant for, you know, researchers to use, but also, of use in the clinic, day to day at a hospital and such. And the use of those tools, you know, the development is really focused on, optimizing the computational core of those tools. But really, only very recently has there been more attention focused on the usability of those tools that a user interface, that sort of thing, and frankly, the training of those tools, you had a very specialized training. I think there's an opportunity now for improving that sort of usability and training by having more game elements in, you know, bringing you up to speed on how to use the tool, making the interactions more intuitive within the tool. And, you know, borrowing various interaction paradigms from the game development community as well, as well as you know, emerging technologies that we see VR and AR and XR, that sort of thing.
Elizabeth Newbury:
All the cool tools, right? They're emerging in the game space.
David Miller:
obviously, as you know, it's challenging as well. You know, any tool has to fit it's going to be used in a clinical setting. It has to fit within clinical workflows, the same, you know, in lab as well. So it just takes development to make sure that, these technologies that are brought over from other fields into biomedical research can be used and applied in a way that makes sense within the new setting.
Elizabeth Newbury:
That sounds like something that has been a lesson learned over the course of years of how to implement these within a clinical setting. It based on just reading between the lines of what you're what you're saying. Could you talk a little bit about how that you've seen that evolution?
David Miller:
It's an area, you know, both on the training side for tools like also VR, which I think had some SBIR funding. So that's a tool for performing various types of surgeries. The example that I saw was, you know, performing knee surgery. But it's a great way to, you know, increase engagement with sort of earlier stage medical students to use those type of tools. And whether or not that tool specifically is, you know, then transferred over to a clinical setting or not, it's certainly prepared med students who are the ones that are going to be, you know, eventually the medical, the doctors and surgeons that are doing it going to be using the skills that they develop from that sort of game like VR environment, in terms of, what gets brought into a clinical workflow? The game dev community operates pretty fast compared to, I would say, the biomed research you know, our standard grant at my institution is five years long, and you've made a proposal, you've suggested, you know what you think you'll learn, and by the end of the five years, you've made some Biomedical Discovery or created some, usually, frankly, early stage prototype of a technology that then, you know, requires further validation, and then, you know, years later away, may be able to go through, you know, FDA and other approvals, right? And there's a whole process for that, clinical trials and such, which is very much outside the scope of the early basic biology aspects that I work on, and that's just in cancer, obviously, the whole panoply of disease that the NIH funds, you know, has related, but still different processes for these, for performing these. So you know what might be expected of, oh, we have this VR headset, and we expect it'll have a three to five year life cycle that may or may not make sense for, you know, a technology that's based in software analysis, but then has to be, you know, implemented in an existing device that may take some time. So partnering between, you know, device makers and game development companies that sort of understand these timelines and can work with academic and other folks that sort of maybe not necessarily work on the same timeline. It's certainly improving, but it is something that I think is going to need additional push.
Elizabeth Newbury:
Interesting. Yeah, it's interesting how, when you bring different industries together, or stakeholders together, that we have to learn from each other a little bit on how each of our individual processes works in order to kind of meet in the middle.
David Miller:
Most fields.
Elizabeth Newbury:
Yes. So when you think of the future of the. Are the possibilities of games in your field in particular, but just in general, for serious games, what do you think is the next big thing? Or what do you think is on the horizon for opportunities?
David Miller:
So obviously, integration with AI technology is certainly going to be there right now that you can have a conversation with your computer and, you know, gain some meaningful insight and engagement. I think that's both going to impact sort of how we interact with our screens, right, a lot less trying to find things and where to click. And then you just say, natural language. Here's what I'd like to do. We're already seeing that in sort of the development of mathematical models that are used within the biomedical space. There's folks at Indiana University working on tasks like that, for doing certain types of agent based modeling with a more sort of natural language verbal approach, rather than having to sort of, you know, very quickly, learn a whole complex tool set and learn a coding language to do that, you can just do it via conversation. The other aspect is that, and this is probably further out, and sort of always the dream, I'm sure others that you've talked to have suggested that is that games and game technologies and game development approaches will, I hope, one day, just be another common expertise that people can bring to the table, as opposed to, oh, We're going to reach out so far from the biomedical, you know, software and technology development community to bring in some expertise. It'll be more of a all these folks that we work with, physical scientists, you know, chemists, whomever it'll be, oh, game developers. They have, they bring their own special set of sort of, you know, engineering, but also sociology type tools for understanding how people interact with each other with technology. And, you know, it will not be sort of a surprise, so to speak, one day, is that, you know, it just comes in all on its own, and doesn't necessarily need its own sort of specific push of a program or of sort of, you know, advocates within, within agencies that do the sort of work that we do.
Elizabeth Newbury:
Great. That's the dream. That's the dream is not having. In my case, having to explain what a serious game is, for example,would be great. Well, I want to make sure to thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it, and we'll leave some links down below for some of the projects that you've talked about, as well as, if you don't mind, the portfolio funding opportunities that you also highlight. So thank you so much, and really appreciate you being here.
David Miller:
Thanks, Liz.
