If this isn’t the coolest new geek-toy, I don’t know what is! Fold.it is a new game by Rosetta@home where players fold proteins for high scores. Shockingly, it’s actually a lot of fun–you can think of it sort of like a super-advanced version of Tetris. A training mode walks players through the basics, and a challenge mode allows players to compete worldwide to see who has the most l33t folding skillz.

Fold.It – Who says serious games can’t be fun, too?

The goals of the research project are to learn what strategies human players use to solve the very complex problem of protein folding so the same techniques can be taught to computers. In addition, players will soon be able to solve protein folding “puzzles” that computers haven’t yet solved. While the puzzles currently available are all proteins where the real-life structure is known, plans are to release proteins where the structure is unknown in the very near future–allowing players to participate in real-world research and help save lives. If any break-throughs do occur, researchers have promised to share credit with the player who solved it. How cool is that?

Eventually, players may even be able to design their own proteins!

Download it now: Fold-It

Why make games? Steve Meretzky, formerly of Infocom and currently of Blue Fang games, gives us all a reason to be in his speech “The Most Perfect Video Game”, presented at the Boston Postmortem:

This plugin exports your AC3D file into NMF format, the native input format of the ATI NormalMapper utility. NormalMapper allows you to generate normal maps, bent normals and ambient occlusion maps suitable for use in video games and other realtime 3D applications.

If you aren’t familiar with normal maps, normal maps are a way to make your low-polygon model look more detailed by encoding surface information from a high-polygon version of the same model into a texture map. Ben Cloward has an excellent tutorial where you can learn more.

This plug-in requires the free NormalMapper utility available from AMD in order to process the output files. The companion NormalMapperUI (Stand Alone) available at the same location is also helpful, but not required.

Download the plugin. (Requires Windows XP, AC3D 6.2 or above.)

Games, books, and movies may be entertainment, but they also influence the way people think. The “Values at Play” research project, a collaboration between Hunter College’s innovative Tiltfactor Lab and New York University sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is investigating how game designers unconsciously and consciously express and encourage specific worldviews through their creations.

This looks like an interesting project, providing a growing body of useful research for seasoned developers, as well as game design contests and curriculum tools for students and educators.

http://valuesatplay.org/