Until recently, I've always had to make excuses for being an avid video gamer.
I mean, let's face it: Telling someone you're into video games rates slightly lower on the cool scale than saying you collect stamps or still sleep with "Teddy."
If you look at the stereotypes in movies and on television, hardcore gamers are usually portrayed as socially inept, overweight slackers who've never gotten past first base with a girl and still live in their parents' basements at 40.
Either that or they're socially inept but precocious 14-year-olds who live with their parents and are actually hacker-geniuses.
I don't get why gamers aren't allowed to own homes or even apparently rent in TV Land, but I'm guessing it's the same set of laws that allows guns to be fired infinitely without reloading.
But the point being: Gamers haven't exactly been the most respected folks out there.
That's the past, though.
Things are a little different now.
I love pointing out that today the video game industry is a multi-billion-dollar affair that outshines the Hollywood movie industry in terms of profits.
In fact, more and more big-name Hollywood directors (guys like Lucas and Spielberg) and actors are getting involved in making games than ever before.
And video games have been used for both military training and as a recruitment tool (the free U.S. Army-made America's Army, for instance) over the past few years.
But this week, gamers were shown to not only be helping to save orc and dragon-plagued video realms, but the real world as well.
In a paper published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, researchers said online gamers have solved a molecular biology riddle that could lead to new drugs to fight HIV - the virus that causes AIDS.
Using a game created by a University of Washington biochemist called Foldit, players try to find the best ways to fold a protein into a 3D structure based on the laws of physics.
Recently, players of the game solved a puzzle involving a protein from the virus that causes AIDS in rhesus monkeys - and they did it in record time.
In fact, players solved the puzzle in only a few days, where researchers had been trying for 15 years.
Researchers at McGill also have a game that lets players find similarities between DNA sequences among different organisms.
Some games have even unintentionally aided science.
A few years ago, the online game World of Warcraft created a contagious disease to infect players as part of a game-world event.
A glitch in the programming code (and a few malicious players) caused the illness to become a virtual plague as it spread throughout the lands and wiped out lower-level characters. Virtual cities were even evacuated in attempts to avoid infection.
The whole game had to be reset to finally purge the pandemic.
The episode caught the attention of both health officials and anti-terrorism authorities, as it proved to be a good study of how a population would react to such an event.
So the next time you feel like hurling disdain (or dishes) at the back of a gamer's head as he or she sits in front of his/her monitor - remember those persons' tireless efforts on behalf of humanity.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to selflessly, er, test the durability of magical weapons against dragonhide. for all of your sakes, of course.
Afterwards, Teddy and I plan to take a nap.
