Red Dead Research Redemption

I was very excited to read today about The Wellcome Trust's 'gamify your research' initiative. This is the natural and welcome next step in the infantilisation of research that began with EPSRC's 'sandpits'. At the time unreconstructed academics such as Prof Thomas Docherty complained that the concept of sandpits 'regards us as noisy children who can be tamed and contained...after the sandpit, will it be the playpen?'

Playpen! What a ridiculous notion! No, it's the video game, silly. As we all know, the only way to make research appealing is to anthropomorphise it as a well endowed avatar, and set it loose in a post-apocalyptic landscape where it has to kill zombies with a range of cruel and unusual weapons.

This initiative should be lauded. No longer will research be held back for want of a 211-V Plasma Cutter, Blades of Chaos, or an Insect Swarm Plasmid. To be honest, I'm amazed that Crick and Watson got as far as they did without somehow co-opting Black Ops 2 into their quest for the structure of DNA.