Why the Battle Against Cancer Needs Awesome Video Games

In the book, Yoshimi discusses the "meta-game" - the process of creating this suite of powerful, irresistible games. He details everything they need: crack programmers, visionary leaders and deep-pocketed financiers, as well as reward structures for users and smooth links between gamers and labs. At the center of it all Yoshimi envisions Simbody, a game engine that simulates biological systems from whole bodies to nanoscale.

Start with a cancer conundrum. Break down the problem until there's one task a game could tackle. Plug it in. Yoshimi said the suite, which he dubbed "Cancer Wars," could use all the game styles: action, adventure, role-playing, first-person shooter, strategy, sports.

Only a couple years ago, artificial intelligence, which Yoshimi has studied for years, punched the turbos with the arrival of large language models such as ChatGPT. Suddenly, it seemed AI was going to change the game. Why turn to people for crowdsourcing when LLMs have trillions of bits of information crowded into their silicon brains?

Actually, why not do both?

Yoshimi said many of the existing citizen science games have AI elements that work hand-in-hand with the player, matching the former's data-processing power with the latter's power of intuition.

"We want to have human-AI symbiosis," he said. "AI can do raw number crunching and statistical generalization. Humans see the bigger picture, the relevance of one thing to another, the creative insight that a machine finds harder to capture."

Think Capt. Picard and Data, Yoshimi said. Luke Skywalker and C3PO. Kirk and Spock.

"AI has made big jumps, but it's not at a point where we push a button, ChatGPT thinks about it for a month and solves the problem," he said. "The best games will take AI as far as it can go, interweaved with human intelligence, so the experience is seamless."

Yoshimi hopes "Gaming Cancer" offers a roadmap for ramping up video games in the fight against cancer. He added that eradicating the disease is a worthy goal but certainly not the only one. There are countless important victories within reach. Detection and treatments for the hundreds of cancer types demand attention. Games can foster an understanding of clinical research and promote lifestyle choices that can reduce cancer risk.

Because this is cancer we're talking about. Only heart disease kills more Americans. Why not bring a legion of video gamers into the battle?

"It's worth the effort," Yoshimi said. "Even if you don't hit the moon shot, all the intermediate shots are valuable."