People spend a significant amount of time playing games and solving puzzles. It has always been argued that there must be some benefit that could be derived from the endeavors. Many man-hours, computer computation and power go into playing games. Obviously, they serve some physiological and psychological functions since so many people continue playing games.
Foldit, was one of the important games that received a lot of attention was made David Baker, and Seth Cooper at University of Washington alongwith an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University called, Adrien Treuille. (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~treuille/) The function of the game is to enable humans (with the help of computers) to solve a protein folding problem. The interesting part is that it is not such a use of the processing time, like the search for extra-terrestrial life, SETI, was doing with the computers. This requires active participation by human and seems like basic problem solving.
The purpose of the game is to optimize protein folding. Currently, even if we know the sequence of amino acids in a protein, it is difficult to fold it correctly since there are many variations in which the protein can fold and not all of the energy minimization calculations work correctly. The premise of the game is that humans are great at pattern searching and will be able to find optimal shapes and structures better than humans. If humans do find structures that are useful, then the computers can be taught to use similar algorithms and understand the process.
This has great social implications and there are several participants who have spent considerable effort and solved complicated puzzles in protein folding. It will be interesting to see the accomplishments besides the 2 mentioned previously: A crystal structure of Mason-Pfizer monkey virus that had not been solved for 15 years and modification of a enzyme to enhance its activity by 18 fold.
The group is also been having fun designing snowflakes and the image is from their website