PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Benjamin M. Good
AU  - Sarah Santini
AU  - Margaret Wallace
AU  - Nicholas Fortugno
AU  - John Szeder
AU  - Patrick Mooney
AU  - Jerome Waldispuhl
AU  - Ginger Tsueng
AU  - Andrew I Su
TI  - Science Game Lab: tool for the unification of biomedical games with a purpose
AID  - 10.1101/156141
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 156141
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/10/156141.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/10/156141.full
AB  - Games with a purpose and other kinds of citizen science initiatives demonstrate great potential for advancing biomedical science and improving STEM education. Articles documenting the success of projects such as Fold.it and Eyewire in high impact journals have raised wide interest in new applications of the distributed human intelligence that these systems have tapped into. However, the path from a good idea to a successful citizen science game remains highly challenging. Apart from the scientific difficulties of identifying suitable problems and appropriate human-powered solutions, the games still need to be created, need to be fun, and need to reach a large audience that remain engaged for the long-term. Here, we describe Science Game Lab (SGL) (https://sciencegamelab.org), a platform for bootstrapping the production, facilitating the publication, and boosting both the fun and the value of the user experience for scientific games with a purpose.