Cancer is a fact of life, we all face it. It’s this terrible random thing that kind of strikes out of nowhere and it’s just so tragic. I had kids and I would watch my kids game and I was always just impressed.

They’re not that excited about their homework but they are doing the most complicated and intricate things in these games. The motivation is the game itself. We are problem-solving creatures.

Our ancestors did better when they solved problems. You could take scientific problems and embed them into the mechanics of a game and get everyday citizens to try and use that open loop game, that struggling and striving how can I solve this problem energy we have and apply it to a scientific problem. Coronavirus vaccines that are stable at room temperatures were developed in part with player input from that game Eterna.

That’s a real scientific achievement that had a meaningful impact that originates in part from the efforts of game players. People collectively contribute to public goods and make an actual difference all the time. We’re wired for connection but most of us are faking it to fit in.

I’m Tonya Kubo and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras because around here what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.

We love to talk about community, how to build it, grow it, sustain it but today we’re talking about what happens when the communities you belong in don’t really overlap but then something maybe forces them to. So when the academic and the researcher and the grieving loved one all find themselves in the same room something new may emerge and in this case we’ve got today’s guest Jeff Yoshimi, a professor at UC Merced whose work spans philosophy cognitive science and neural networks and he is a researcher and a systems thinker I would say and someone who found himself deeply impacted by cancer. So Jeff I don’t want to give away everything yet but I do want to kick us off with you telling us who your freaks are and why you love them.

So yeah my freaks are game designers and game players and people interested in using competitions and challenges and again video games to do good things you know. We think that these are not just tools for having fun or which is fine you know but it’s more about stealing a car in Grand Theft Auto. These are actually like works of art that could elevate and empower people and lead to things like cures to diseases.

So the freaks are the people who think of games in that way. Yeah which I find fascinating because you know before we started recording you said that you don’t really consider yourself a gamer but you’ve written a book that really is targeting gamers and game designers as your audience. So do you want to tell us a little bit about what got you to there because that might be a bit of a leap for some people.

Yeah so I mean I was a gamer way back in the early days of coin-op video games so back in the 80s and 90s I was pretty into games and they were so expensive at first a quarter a piece and it wouldn’t last long and then you know once I had personal computers I was very much into it and I always thought about I always liked things where I could approach them graphically and visually and so that really stayed with me and then as I got older and got into philosophy and cognitive science I was always trying to find ways to visualize things. I worked in the 1990s on this giant project mapping out all the debates in AI with this guy Bob Horn who wrote a book called Visual Language. He was a very interesting guy he stills active at 91.

I’m about to post about him and the work we did together and so that’s been a current through my whole life but I got busy with grad school and with my research and everything so actual gaming kind of fell off but then I had kids and I would watch my kids game and I was curious about it and I was always just impressed like you know they’re not that excited about their homework but they are doing the most complicated and intricate things in these games without needing the motivation is the game itself it’s just so beautifully designed so you know I was a gamer and then I’ve been an interested onlooker kind of thinking about them and their potential since then okay so what you observed is that the design can drive their interest more than whatever incentive there is in the game is that what you were saying yeah I think and I think at one point I say they the game designers are the heroes of the book you know they’re the ones who design these things that take what’s essentially a problem-solving situation you know how do I kill the boss monster how do I get to the next level how do I get the next level after that and they arrange it all in a way that is just intrinsically motivating and it’s a combination of art of mechanics of design of programming of technology that just taps into this thing we have in us I mean we are problem-solving creatures our ancestors did better when they solve problems you know if you had two groups groups of people on savannah and one of them was like how do I you know evade that predator how do I catch more fish how do I how do I you know make sure that my kids are safe you know and they’re coming up with gadgets and contraptions and stuff to do that and strategies and then you got another group over on the other side of the hill it’s like yeah whatever I’m just not going to try it we’re fine well the group that is trying to solve problems does better and after many generations of that we have these brains that like to solve problems and so I’m just very interested in how do we how do we tap into that yeah and you know what it’s funny is in marketing you know we always talk about open loops like a lot of marketing language is based around leaving an open loop in somebody’s mind because the brain like you said it wants to solve a problem it wants to close the loop and so a lot of marketing language is engineered to getting a person to want to close that loop and close it fast and a lot of your book so your book is called gaming cancer which I love the title by the way and I mean it really seeks to play into that idea of the human brain and gamers specifically wanting to close loops I think of in some games how there’s always easter eggs right so people become curious they’re not just trying to get from a to b do you want to tell us a little bit about what led you to writing this specific book well I mean so the backstory is so I gave you part of the backstory right I I was into games I was into visualization I always I’ve approached everything in my life through the lens of how do I visualize it how do I take this information that’s out there and get it up here right the link between complex information and our brains and I think visualizations and games and challenges and things like that are part of it and so then you know as you said in your intro so my sister-in-law had cancer you know my grandfather died of cancer cancer is a fact of life we all face it it’s this terrible random thing that kind of strikes out of nowhere and it’s just so tragic and then it hit my wife and it had metastasized and it was just I was just I was I was freaked out in the bad sense of freakier and and I’ve I had thought about this before I was like I you know it’s I want to be involved I want to do something what could I do you know what’s going on here how could I fix this that kind of mentality and I had heard about citizen science a few years before my wife got cancer and so that was kind of the final that was like an extra key an extra step in the process of like you could take scientific problems and embed them into the mechanics of a game and get everyday citizens to try and use that what we talked about that open loop game that struggling and striving how can I solve this problem energy we have and apply it to a scientific problem without having to spend a decade in a wet lab right a gamer could just get into a game and start actually contributing to a scientific problem and so that confluence of events so my wife’s cancer feeling helpless my background in visualization and knowing about this kind of citizen science that was happening kind of all kind of coalesced together and I thought not enough people are doing this there needs to be more of this there needs to be some and I was like what could I do well I can make a philosophical argument I’m a philosopher I can make a kind of programmatic statement and I can make a book filled with visuals to kind of make a call to arms right let’s hey freaks back in your terms hey gamers hey game designers let’s do more of this right let’s let’s build more of these games can’t there’s so many for the landscape of cancer is so complicated there’s so many types of cancer so many specific issues relating to cancer and there’s so many kinds of games there’s just a ton of potential here and I wanted to sort of make the pitch for that oh my gosh so I love this because we’ve we’ve discussed this before that cancer touches everybody in some way it’s it’s really hard to find anybody in the U.S. or even in the world who can say yeah no I I haven’t heard of it I don’t know anybody who’s had it and I find that people everybody seems to feel helpless especially when it touches a loved one or themselves and everybody seeks a way of overcoming that helplessness like differently right some will really hop on to wearing a specific color of ribbon right it’s the pink ribbon it’s the purple ribbon some really jump into fundraising efforts Relay for Life the Komen Run and then others will get take more the advocacy approach they’ll feel like it’s a lifestyle situation so they want to advocate for different lifestyles maybe cleaning up food ingredients everybody seems to have their thing and what centralizes all of it is this desire to no longer feel helpless to be in action to feel like they’re contributing to part of the solution and what I love about your story in particular is you really sat there and said okay what do I have to bring to the table right you’re not a doctor so that’s right and so I’m wondering like what was that moment was that a quiet moment in the hospital was that at home or was that just that process of your brain not shutting off through the journey where it came to you hey this is what I could do and I think this is going to work yeah so first of all I really like what you said Tanya about like there’s different ways of responding to this tragic occurrence which does indeed impact all of us either ourselves or our loved ones and I like your four I think had four categories of response and I think part of what I’m doing in the book is adding a fifth category like beyond like it feels like unless you’re a scientist like all you could do is raise money or raise awareness and help with prevention these are noble honorable things we should keep doing them there is an additional thing there’s a certain kind of mentality of like there’s a problem I want to fix it we could tap into that and whether you’re an artist a market the thing you said about marketing how do you keep people engaged for these games to work people have to play them they have to be marketed right that marketing plays a role so there’s a way like when you go to a fundraiser you’re just you know you’re raising money that’s fine but when you are when you are a marketer and you could bring that skill to a specific game that could lead to a cure you’re using a skill you have a talent you have in a way that directly contributes or if you’re an artist and you do the art for a game relating to cancer you’re using this specific you’re expressing what’s unique to you into this problem like making you know where like you said earlier what could I do to help and I think people like to be able to help you know if you have a big picnic I’m just coming up with this metaphor but if you have a big picnic or a big collective event people don’t want like don’t put me on like scrubbing duty or something I’m not good at yeah I’m not a I’m not a terrible cook put me on I’ll cook some people want to do something that expresses their unique talents and skills and I think we could tap into that here I asked you a question about when did it all come together so actually that’s the opening of the book is that I was actually we were at Stanford it was an overnight stay and I was just very you know I was concerned and scared you know and in the hotel room and I was kind of tossing and turning and Stanford’s of course a university town and there was like a 24-hour coffee shop across the street and I got up at five in the morning and I just said aha it was a kind of flat this will work and I got dressed I went to that there was people there at five in the morning studying so Stanford you know vibes or whatever and I wrote like a treatment I wrote like the first few pages of the book and so yeah it was a specific moment wow and I I’m sorry I don’t live in a town that has a 24-hour coffee shop but I so wish I did yeah well same yeah right so how I’m curious because you know I’ve I have some experience with publishing and I know a lot of times it can be challenging to sell the idea was that hard for you or when you started talking about this concept for the book did other people catch on quickly well I don’t know it’s so in terms of like the whole process of writing the book I was interacting with people who like because there’s a lot of different pieces that are put together in the book I talk about game design I talk about cancer and cancer biology in this extremely visual way I worked closely with artists and in particular Soraya Boza was she did a great job and the people involved there’s a particular game called Eterna an RNA synthesis game which shows I mean an important thing in the book is this isn’t just crazy you know Yoshimi talking there are games that do this this is that are leading to scientific discoveries so there’s a track record of success to build on so I got to know a lot of people in the Eterna community which is also at Stanford and that was all very positive and then the book itself went through was reviewed by 12 different people so the people at MIT I think were like I don’t know this is this is kind of does this this guy doesn’t know he’s not a biologist he’s talking about biology and and so they sent it through multiple rounds and all of that feedback just about was constructive and positive and encouraging and so it’s been positive feedback but now I’m here this is where you know your expertise comes in now I’m here and the book is there I haven’t no one’s I don’t know if anyone’s read it I haven’t gotten much response yet so it’s early days still it’s early to tell I’ve given talks like this and I’ve talked to people and I gave public talks and people reacted well there so I think people like the idea has there been any reaction that’s been meaningful like memorable I should say because I know it’s all meaningful well I mean one kind of reaction I received I remember I gave a talk at and I think Readley College in in Clovis and there was a person in there who was a suffering from cancer and you know I think that that was a meaningful reaction because it just it put some gravity on the situation it’s like look this you’re writing this book this is affecting me right now and I mean I wrote a lot of the book you know and I that hit home because I a lot of the writing was in cancer centers like in the chemo rooms around people who just tragic you know just but but uplifting and joyful and you know my father-in-law you know he passed of cancer as I was writing the book a lot of was written with cancer rooms with him and you know he was very outgoing I don’t Julio I don’t know if you ever met him he’s hard to forget if you’ve met him I don’t think I have he would bring joy to those rooms and so I guess just that kind of reaction like this is a grave and serious thing and it it’s somehow because there’s another side of this it’s just we want to make games that are fun and engaging and there’s play involved so it’s this weird juxtaposition of you know this extremely serious issue concerning mortality and making an activity that’s actually engaging and draws people in yeah well one of the things that you said earlier that I I think is really compelling which is this can fast track research and treatment and cure and I think that’s the hardest thing with a lot not just cancer right but when I’ve talked to other people on the show who have been advocates one of the things we talk about is when it comes to policy change right the wheels move slowly and the winds are so incremental that a lot of people just run out of steam it’s just so exhausting and so this idea that we could take cancer which we’ve been fighting for I don’t even know how many decades at this point and even at least like a hundred years yeah more than that yeah how fast do you think we could make that somebody who read the book embraced everything in there could potentially make meaningful change because granted with cancer there’s so many different types so many different needs to attack it but just having one creative idea yeah it’s it’s hard to say and I think it’s important to make a kind of qualification here like a big part of the book is saying all right well what happened you know this could lead to new ideas to new cures and I think it’s worth trying right but you know the the most likely thing that’s going to happen is continued incremental progress from you know bench lab scientists but you never know right and what a game will do is it will just get people to it’ll take something you know you’re this is an old thing I mean another thing I learned a lot about was creativity and problem solving in the book and it’s an old idea in the problem solving literature that you know when you’re stuck on a problem go take a trip go somewhere else present your idea to somebody different who doesn’t know anything about your research rest you know sleep a little and just reorient your brain to reframe it in a new way and by taking a problem relating to cancer and translating it into the mechanics and aesthetics of maybe some crazy first-person shooter a real-time strategy some wacky kind of context even a serious existing researcher might look at and say all right well this this is not doesn’t make any sense this is this is garbage scientifically maybe but it’s fun and ah I’m seeing things slightly differently so it could encourage new ways of thinking the other thing and the other qualification here is that even if this didn’t lead straight to a cure it would immediately promote more awareness and scientific literacy right by playing the games and by building them we learn more it’s like one thing to read about like the krebs cycle in a book which is so boring it’s another thing to like and put on the vr glasses and be immersed in it and be attacking an enemy and in so doing seeing oh the way to attack the enemy is by making use of the krebs cycle in a certain way like living in in it so I think there’s huge like and like determinate potential for education in this but to answer your question I think it’s maybe right I think we might have more incremental progress and this will just be on the edges kind of making it a little more effective speeding it along a little more and it could be somebody way on the margins playing one of these games or in the process designing it was like oh my god here’s this thing that will cut the gordian knot and lead to some new approach on some existing cancer yeah so what I loved about what you just said so here’s what I just pulled out of what you said I think especially in 2025 so many people don’t want to start something unless they’re 90 sure they’re going to succeed they’re going to hit the goal the target and what you’re saying you wrote a whole book that says I don’t know what could happen but I think it’s worth checking it out what happens if we try and I mean you know in your qualifications I mean you’ve owned it may not do anything right now but it might take us a step closer to something that will do something exactly yeah and at the very least it allows us all of us no matter who we are to be doing one thing toward improvement that’s right and you know you’re the you’re the marketing expert Tanya maybe you could help me frame this better but here’s another way to put it let me just reverse what I just said there’s a hundred percent I’d say 99.9 guarantee that if you build one of these games this is 100 you will learn more about whatever you’re gamifying right and the people playing it will learn more about whatever cellular process you put into a game there’s like a it will definitely work for better education there’s no question in that and then it’s like this fall off of like and yeah it might make us see things in new ways and it could lead to incremental progress and then the other thing the thing to maybe the lead I guess in journalistic terms so this is not another in is it has worked right it’s not crazy right like RNA like coronavirus vaccines that are stable at room temperatures were developed in part with player input from that game Eterna like that’s a real scientific achievement that had a meaningful impact that originates in part from the efforts of game players and you know this there’s actually a long history of that you know in citizen science like the Oxford English Dictionary originates from it was too expensive they couldn’t do it just with paid linguists and philologists they put out a call for everyday people to turn in entries to complete this giant you know document of the English language I mean there’s tons of the Audubon word count there’s these plankton studies that use commercial fishermen I mean people collectively contribute to public goods and make an actual difference all the time so yeah there’s a few ways to frame it so why don’t we know about that more do you think I mean because that is those are all amazing examples not just of community but of somebody in a position of power being courageous enough to say look we just can’t do this we can’t do it with our funding we can’t do with our manpower we can’t do it maybe fast enough maybe we could eventually do it and so we need help and we’re willing to take help from in some cases trained volunteers but in other cases we’ll just take anybody’s help like anybody who has a phone that can take a picture of a plant and submit it we’ll take that what like where do you think that willingness came from and how come we don’t hear about it more so I think we we have some sense of it just from I’m so we all know what Wikipedia is right right and of course that comes from everyday people contributing you mentioned taking pictures of plants so I don’t know if you’ve heard of iNaturalist but it’s exactly that right if you’ve ever gone to a website and like it’s asking you to like fill in you know some information before you can move on that originates in something called CAPTCHA which was how a lot of the Library of Congress was originally digitized they would take a word that was easy like from the optical character recognition you know they would take there were a bunch they would put it through the computer and some of the words in these old documents were hard to recognize by the computer and so people would fill in all right to go to the next part to fill out your bank statement tell us what this word is and by people just doing that that got translated or all of like human knowledge got translated it got digitized and so I think it’s there it’s in the fabric of society but as you say people don’t recognize it as a thing you know there’s been books written on it this is called you know crowdsourcing is a common word for this and you know there’s an aware open source is this Linux comes out of communal collective efforts free of charge yeah I don’t know why it’s the better marketing is needed but again well yeah good no you please you go ahead well the other the thing I want to say that the thing that made all of those things possible this is why the hero is the designer I guess I’m really not focusing on the designer like CAPTCHA is annoying like you don’t want to what is this garbage I have to do for a second here and it’s been sold right now it’s just like developing like it’s helping the machine learning algorithms for like companies like help me find pedestrians whatever but somebody had to figure out this is a piece of this is a problem we can’t solve alone how could I put it into a format where people could help right somebody had to to do it like the Audubon bird count somebody figured out we need this information we could make a public a yearly event somebody had the idea let’s make a yearly event where everybody goes out and counts birds or somebody figured out we’ve got like in the early days of the internet hey you know it’s not too hard on a computer kind of cloud-based server system for people to enter information we could do better than the world book encyclopedia just by making the right interface and so somebody figures out this link between a public good that needs to be served this interest in serving it but there’s only so much interest right people only have so much time how you design the thing in the middle that can bridge from the one to the other so I think designers are a big part of it marketing is a big part of it making people aware of it but we probably need more marketing to make people more aware of it as you say well I think what you just did so well is to draw the explicit connections because I think that’s what we’re probably missing is people tend to think very like there’s a little bit of a laser focus we know what Wikipedia is in a literal sense but we don’t connect what Wikipedia is to what iNaturalist is right right and so that’s the marketing is drawing the connections between the two yeah and I do some of that in the book um but you know the book needs to be marketed right like people need to read that and there’s and there’s a book there’s a famous book um is I think it was just called the wisdom of crowds I think um and so there is some stuff out there but I think there could be more yeah well I think there can always be more yeah so before we let you go I’m curious so if somebody is listening and maybe they’re personally impacted by cancer or maybe there’s something else but they’re in that place that you were where they’re feeling helpless and you know they’re maybe they’re grieving they’re angry they’re helpless they want to do something but they don’t know where to begin what would you advise them that is an excellent question and one where I also I think there should be more work done there should be some like central clearinghouse or meetup or place where people could talk about this and I speculated a little bit in the book about how to do this but as of now there’s nothing like that and so I think you have to be a self-advocate so go out there play some games there’s a thing called Zooniverse that shows some games there’s my book where I summarize games like Eterna and Foldit watch videos about those like familiarize yourself with the power of what are sometimes called serious games games for good and gamified citizen science see what that could do and then try to like track down somebody who could program it’s easier than ever right people talk about vibe coding AI is a big part of the book too right this is not just humans alone doing it it’s humans in concert with AI which is a much more powerful like combination that has ever been possible before AI is dangerous it’s scary but it also has redemptive power and we ought to be harnessing it so like it’s easier than ever to like take some vision you have for a game and to manifest it to make it real if you team up with the right people so I would say find out what’s possible find a team and build it and maybe if you hear this and you’re interested figure out a way to like we need to make that meeting place too I don’t know what the right way to do it is like shark tank competitions where people pitch things to investors like twice a year or like a subreddit like I don’t know the right forum but you know you really are touching on something Tanya is that there’s people who are concerned like yeah sure I hear this what do I do and there’s artists who would probably like to help and there’s designers and game developers who would like to help how do we link them together that those all those freaks are in different freak pods right let’s how do we get those pods together well I think part of it is doing what you’re doing which is being willing to go into a lot of different places and talking about it it’s asking the questions and then I think for the rest of us right who don’t see ourselves necessarily in the gaming or coding space it’s just keeping our ears open for other people and letting them know that these sorts of things exist I think that’s what makes books so powerful is you know the right book even in the wrong hands eventually lands in the right hands because somebody will read a book and they’ll be like oh that wasn’t for me or it was over my head but somebody else will be talking about something related and they’ll say oh I read this book it wasn’t for me but you might like it because of what you just said so that’s part of it and that’s why topics like gaming cancer have to be books it’s not enough to make them an article it’s not enough to make them you know a few sentences on twitter all right Jeff we’re gonna let you go I will put all of your information in the show notes we’ll put a link to gaming cancer we’ll put your website I believe you’re most active on twitter and blue sky or the platform formerly known as twitter now known as x any place else we can find you so I’m on linkedin and I’ve got a facebook professional page but as you say blue sky and and twitter x are where I’m probably most active awesome and before we fully end are you open to a rapid fire series of questions yeah all right so five questions no wrong answers so let’s finish this sentence you’re my kind of freak if you see games as powerful tools for change that was good what’s something you love that your friends don’t get phenomenology I’m so glad you said that out loud because I didn’t know how to pronounce that word okay what community would you infiltrate just to understand it better your community okay what tool ritual or practice helps you stay connected to your people social media actually oh I like that and what is who is an email and honestly email yeah all professors it’s email yeah yeah so who is someone doing freakishly good work who you think deserves a bigger stage Zach Barthes Nikki Case and I’ll I’ll leave it with them they’re both incredible game designers all right so Jeff thank you thank you for refusing to keep your brilliance in a single box for showing all of us how science can be personal how grief can sometimes be generative and that games are more than a distraction they can actually be an effective blueprint towards solving some really big problems and everyone listening here if you’ve ever felt like your work your passion or your pain couldn’t possibly belong in the same room I hope this episode and Jeff’s story reminds you that sometimes the only way forward is to bring all of it with you we’ll see you next time thanks Jeff thank you so much it’s great to be here that’s it for this episode of find your freaks to help more weirdos find their way here subscribe rate and leave a review and if you’re craving connection join the freak show at finderfreaks.com what makes you weird makes you wonderful normal was never the point