[willyg302]

Related: this game grew out of Seth Cooper's PhD dissertation [1] "A Framework for Scientific Discovery through Video Games", which won the ACM Dissertation Award in 2011. Although a lot of the content is Foldit-centric (protein algorithms, etc.), it still has a wealth of information on game design and gamification, well worth looking at for anyone interested in game development.

[1] http://grail.cs.washington.edu/theses/Cooper2011PhD.pdf

[mrdrozdov]

I was lucky enough to see him speak at the University of Michigan (http://www.cse.umich.edu/eecs/etc/events/showevent.cgi?2665).

Also, I just finished reading REAMDE, and Fold.it is extremely similar to the fictional APPIS discussed in the book. It's still a fairly untapped area, looking to games in order to gain real life advantages. Although besides Fold.it, ReCaptcha, DuoLingo and the ESP game seem to be using related strategies to yield results of some degree.