Sometimes, life gets wilder than fiction. Cancer is a painful example of this - something I unfortunately had to find out the hard way. Luckily, it has also brought me a lot of good things. Most remarkably, I’m now working together with people from the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek hospital, the very same hospital that successfully treated my testicular cancer in 2020!

Back in February 2021, I received an email from Hugo Horlings, one of the hospital’s pathologists (and the man in the picture). He aimed to establish a game project with the goal of assisting pathologists worldwide in collecting annotations for microscopic images. This could then serve as input for AI development that would help pathologists make more accurate and faster diagnoses. The idea was that, with a basic gamified training, layman citizens could actually make these annotations by playing a game. And if enough people would play that game, they could effectively do an equally good job as professional pathologists, who were already burdened with way too much work as it is!

Hugo had gotten stuck, though. He felt that the project should approach the general public more directly than “serious games” that are developed in collaboration with hospitals or other health institutes tend to do. He was looking for an introduction in the world of commercial, entertainment games. In response, somebody at the communication department of the hospital mentioned to him that they had worked on a Movember campaign with someone who might be able to help out; that someone… was me.

After a short introduction, a couple of emails and a bunch of video calls within my network, it became clear to me that this could in fact be a viable idea within the space of entertainment video games - an industry I know and love! When presenting my findings to Hugo, the excitement was off the charts: we had found a way forward for the project! From that point on, we started working together with as highlight so far two test rounds in 2024 of our first game: Tilly!

<aside> 📧 [EMAIL ME ABOUT THIS PROJECT!](mailto:[email protected]?subject=Game%20against%20cancer)

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