'Gamers' tag is a poor fit, whichever way you Foldit

The phrases 'real world scientific progress' and 'the power of online games' are strange bedfellows. Yet surprisingly, they found themselves thrust together in the media last week due to the publication of an article in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. This was the latest result of Foldit, a multiplayer online game developed by a team based at the University of Washington that cleverly uses the framework of a game for laypeople to help decipher the structures of proteins - in this case the structure of a protein known as retroviral protease that's key to the way HIV multiplies.