Our Grad Students Capture Honors!

ClimateQuest-300x167Fresh from UW Today, news regarding the the inaugural Climate Game Jam. This game jam challenged teams at 11 sites across the nation to design a game around the theme of climate adaptation — and to present the idea in a video within 48 hours. Climate Quest, a video game, won first place in the “college” category. It was designed by Dargan Frierson, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences, and Zuoming Shi, a computer science and engineering doctoral student who is a member of the UW’s Center for Game Science and currently working as part of our neuroscience game team.



Happy New Year from CGS

RainyCampus_6-XLHappy new year from the Center for Game Science! We are busy putting together our calendar for this spring – are you on it? We love having field trips to the Center and welcome your group! Additionally, you will want to mark your calendars now for Engineering Discovery Days. This huge 2-day event takes place in April this year and is always a great time for everyone.

We look forward to sharing more news soon regarding the results of our fall challenge in Foldit, some exciting Nanocrafter updates, and news from the small team devoted to bringing our neuroscience game to life. It’s an exciting 2016 ahead and we can’t wait to see you all as well!



Winter is coming!

A sunny day at the University of Washington Seattle campus, silhouette of George Washington statue. Photo by Katherine B. Turner

Winter is coming to CGS, and with it a few small updates:

Come see us and many other great CSE groups at Computing Open House on Saturday, December 5th to kick off Computer Science Education Week.

Next, we’re pleased to announce Dragon Architect has a new website!

Finally, our time as part of the Verigames family may be coming to a close, but that doesn’t mean the fun has to stop for Paradox  fans. We are pleased to announce you can continue to play Paradox straight from the Center for Game Science website. Paradox (and Flow Jam) wouldn’t have been possible without the dedicated efforts of many people over the years and we want to say thank you for playing along with us.



Nanocrafter Up for Award

CGSWebSiteNanocrafterCircleNanocrafter has been chosen as one of the top 10 in the Interactives category in the 2016 Visualization Challenge (The ‎Vizzies‬). In addition to standard judging, there’s also a public voting element this year – you can help us get to the top. The top vote-getter will be designated the People’s Choice. Voting starts today, November 12 and closes November 17 at 11:59 p.m. (PST). Tell everyone you know to vote for Nanocrafter and please share this post far and wide!

Good job on the top 10 ranking, Nanocrafter team!



Foldit vs. University of Michigan Science Challenge

Circle with Foldit GraphicEarlier today we released a special puzzle challenge for the Foldit community based on a structure of a protein solved by crystallographers in the Bardwell Lab at the University of Michigan.

Recently, our scientists learned the Bardwell scientists decided to challenge a class of undergraduate biochemistry students to build a model into this unrefined density map before publishing the results. Knowing our community would also enjoy a challenge, the lab also invited Foldit players to participate!

The Foldit community has four weeks to develop a protein model that fits this density. Can Foldit players outperform the University of Michigan students—or even the crystallographers themselves?