Reporting on Foldit: First Contact, a narrative-enhanced version of the citizen science game Foldit, our study of live gameplay data among hundreds of users showed a significant increase in player engagement with the game due to the inclusion of our self-reflexive science fiction storyline. The paper won “Best Paper Award” at the 2023 Foundations of Digital Games conference. See below for a video produced by the FDG organizers about our paper:

See here for the published paper:

Josh Aaron Miller, Katherine Buse, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Seth Cooper, Justin Siegel, and Colin Milburn, “Wrapped in Story: The Affordances of Narrative for Citizen Science Games” (last author/Principal Investigator), co-authored with ), in Foundations of Digital Games 2023 (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2023). https://doi.org/10.1145/3582437.3582443