Bench Press

In a world with flashy distractions like YouTube and Modern Warfare 2, how the heck do you get students to be interested in monocyte recruitment?

One idea that the Federation of American Scientists is proof-of-concept-ing is the use of video games as tools for science education. To that end, the FAS developed, in conjunction with game studio Escape Hatch Entertainment, a game called Immune Attack (trailer below):

The premise of the game is pretty creative. A patient who suffers from a non-functioning immune system needs the player’s help to train her immune cells on how to fight off a bacterial infection. More detail can be found in the lesson plan on the Immune Attack website, but the game itself covers multiple phases showing:

• how leukocytes move from bloodstream to infection site
• how leukocytes are recruited by chemical signals
• how the immune system can recognize pathogen-associated molecular patterns
• phagocytosis (how white blood cells devour pathogens that they find)
• how white blood cells can recruit additional immune cells with chemokines
• how natural killers and MHC molecules can identify cells infected by viruses

While the game’s concept is original, the production value of the game is not quite up to a full-fledged professional studio. Although, to be fair, for only a ~500MB download and from an effort that wasn’t backed by a major game company, the quality was fairly impressive. The problem, though, is that the game mechanics are oriented around maneuvering about the 3D world to train the patient’s immune system how to respond to infection. The game is thus very dependent on the quality of the controls and the graphics. As I was playing on a Thinkpad T400 using a Trackpoint, it was actually fairly difficult at times to do the maneuvers necessary to move on to the next level.

The interface was also somewhat klunky – being similar enough to a standard first-person shooter controls but with enough variations to make the controls a little awkward (the need to hold down the right mouse button while steering with the mouse and the inability of the keyboard to change the pitch of motion were annoying). The software also didn’t feel complete bug-free. Just to see what would happen, I deliberately failed a mission requiring me to identify and destroy 5 infected cells before a viral infection destroyed 5 healthy cells. When I re-started the mission, the count of destroyed healthy cells began at 5 – is it any wonder that I failed the mission, again?

With all that said, I do believe that this was a very impressive effort that just needs a little polishing. The music and graphics were a little hokey, and the lesson plan materials need to be fleshed out a bit better, but the game mechanics were designed very well to ingrain visually and physically how monocyte transmigration worked, how white blood cells are recruited, and how basic viral and bacterial pathogens spread infection. While I wouldn’t say I’m yet fully convinced that this approach will work, I am optimistic that this is a good method to help scientists convey very complicated phenomena to students.