So this week I'm going to be doing something that I never
thought I'd be doing on Bite Sci-zed,
reviewing a smartphone game.
The game is called Plague Inc., and before you ask,
I have not been contacted by the company.
They haven't asked me to do this.
I just heard about this game and once I found out what it was,
I had to try it out.
No, I don't consider myself a gamer,
but the premise of the game is that you
are a bacteria or a virus and you trying to infect and kill
the entire world.
And it has some scientific problems,
and I'll get to those, including the one large one in a minute.
But I think that the ideas that you
have to use to complete the game are
pretty interesting in regards to how diseases are transmitted.
Now you start off by infecting one person,
and you get to choose the country in which you
infect that person.
Now thinking about the countries in this game
is really important, because you're given a world map.
But depending on how wealthy a country
is, that determines how much health care its citizens have
access to, and so the level of health care
determines how quickly and infection will spread.
So if you start off in a wealthy country
or if your infection eventually reaches a wealthy country,
it might have to evolve some antibiotic resistance
or antiviral resistance to allow it
to spread in a country with adequate health care.
So this brings us to the things that you
can choose about your disease.
And these are things that you have
to think of about disease transmission in the real world,
how it's transmitted, what its symptoms are,
and what its abilities are.
And so you can choose to have this disease transmitted
in insects, in birds, in rodents,
you can have it transmitted on air,
or you can have it be a waterborne disease.
And those are all things that you would really
have to consider.
And similarly, you can have this disease
cause different symptoms.
So if someone is coughing, you might want
to make it an airborne disease.
It can end up--
the symptoms go from everything.
You start off with things that are like coughing and rashes,
and you end up with things that are
like total organ failure and pneumonia, and really
vicious things.
So to me, this is a really interesting strategy game,
because you have to really think about how
diseases are transmitted.
So my normal strategy is to make sort of a low lying disease
that people don't really notice.
Maybe there's a little bit of coughing,
maybe there's a little bit of sneezing.
I may get airborne, I may get bird borne.
So it starts spreading, and people are spreading it
to each other, and it gets all the way around the world,
but it's not really cause for concern yet.
If you start off with a disease is instantly making people die,
well, the world starts to work on a cure.
The humans catch on.
So I try and make something a little bit sneaky.
And then once I've infected most of the world, bam,
that's when I snap in the total organ failure,
and then the world comes crashing down
before people had a time to make a cure that will effectively
cure them.
And you have all these stats going along, number of humans
infected, number of humans dead.
And it sounds morbid, and it actually
is when you really think of it, but it's really
cool strategy of how you go from starting
with one infected person to infecting the entire world,
and then bringing them down.
Now if you're savvy, you realize that my strategy
is the biggest scientific hole in this game,
because that's not how things evolve.
So let's think about this from the beginning.
You infect your first person.
Let's say that they are just coughing.
When they cough on somebody else,
patient number two is also just coughing.
They cough on somebody else, and now patient number three
is coughing, and then inside that person,
it mutates so that they're coughing and sneezing.
Well, this means that on person number four,
after person number three coughs on them, person number four
will also cough and sneeze, but it does not
mean that persons one in two will cough and sneeze.
Because when something evolves, your little disease
decides to mutate, that means that going forwards
it will carry that mutation on to all the new people
that it infects.
However, it does not mean that the people previously infected
are somehow going to suddenly start sneezing too.
That's not how these things work.
So if I want to play of the game by infecting the entire world
with coughing, and then I click the little total organ failure
button in the game, if it was realistic,
it would mean that that person in whom
the disease goes from coughing to sudden total organ failure--
crazy, I know-- from then on, anyone
that they infected would also have total organ failure,
but all the people who have previously
been infected by just coughing, they're still
going to be just coughing.
So is it scientifically accurate?
No, it's not.
But it's a really cool sort of game,
and it gets you thinking about how viruses spread.
You can watch little airplanes move,
and if you've made a virus that's
really good at spreading in dry air,
it'll spread to wherever those airplanes are going,
and you have to think about the countries and the health care
in them, and you have to think about whether or not
you're spreading something by insects,
or if you're spreading it by rodents in a very urban area.
So there are a lot of different factors
that go into how a disease spreads, and I think the game,
does a pretty good job of thinking
of all of those different things.
And so is it scientifically 100% spot on?
No.
But is it a good way to start thinking
about how diseases are indeed spread
and what factors you have to think of?
Yeah, I think it's kind of cool.
So I spent a good amount of time in the past couple
of days thinking of strategies of how to evolve a disease
to take over the world.
It's been pretty cool.
And I think while it's not 100% scientifically accurate,
it might be an interesting way for teachers
to get their students interested in thinking
of the concepts of how diseases are transmitted
and what different things you have to think
about when modeling a disease.
It's not perfect.
It's not spot on.
But it's pretty interesting.
So this week, go forth, play some games, and do science.
But the premise of this game is that you
are a bacteria or a plane.
You're not a plane.
That'd be cool if you were a plane.
I'd like to be a plane sometimes.