Why Are Gamers So Much Better Than Scientists at Catching Fraud?
2nd July 2021
The rigorous format in which the speedrunning community asks players to provide video proof of their runs is itself significant. For many games, you need to show not just a recording of your screen, but also a video of your hands on the controller or keyboard, so moderators can ensure that it really was a human—and not a script or a bot—that clinched the all-important record.
Science has been much slower to adapt, even after countless scandals. Researchers provide images for their papers entirely at their own discretion, and with no official oversight; when they aren’t faked, they might still contain cherry-picked snapshots of experiments that don’t represent the full range of their results. The same applies to numerical data, which are often—consciously or unconsciously—chosen or reported to make the best case for a scientist’s hypothesis, rather than to show the full and messy details. Only a few journals require scientists to do the equivalent of posting the screen-and-hands recording: sharing all their data, and the code they used to analyze it, online for anyone to access.
The most interesting thing is that video gaming won’t win you a lifetime cushy job at a university through tenure. So the rigor ought to align exactly the opposite of the way it actually does.