Dear Capcom,
Muahahahahahaha, hello.
Thought you were safe, did you?
Thought I couldn’t possibly write to you because you largely cater to the console market.
Thought I’d be ignoring you in favor of a more recent title like Gears of War or Titanfall 2?
Well think again!
I mean, sure, I’ll probably do an episode on Titanfall 2 or Gears of War.
Erm.
Maybe. I mean.
Just look at Gears of War 4.
It’s okay.
But there’s no SCIENCE as far as I’ve gotten.
At least not sexy stuff.
But you, Capcom, you know about the sexy stuff.
You have guts.
Actually you’re single-handedly responsible for one of my favorite games growing up as
a kid: Mega Man X, and, incidentally, you’re responsible for the game most responsible
for making me shit my pants in middle school: Resident Evil.
Which honestly seems laughable now, especially if you look at the graphics.
Although to be entirely honest, they are a different kind of terrifying in their own right.
I mean, what’s scarier: an actual zombie dog, or a misshapen and discolored collection
of polygons that knows no fear and hungers only for human flesh?
In either case, it’s Halloween soon, and I noticed that a remaster of the first Resident
Evil game was for sale on Steam, so I picked it up.
And god damn it looks good.
The plot of the franchise as it’s aged has gotten a bit rough around the edges, but in
the beginning, they knew what they were doing.
Six people stuck in a creepy mansion filled with monsters and limited resources?
Sometimes the simplest stuff works best.
Resident Evil 2 and 3 take place two months after the events of Resident Evil 1, when
the entire Town of Raccoon city has been completely overrun by zombies.
And, you know, in a world where we’re convinced that a Zombie apocalypse is just around the
corner, and are equally convinced that it could never really happen, I don’t find
myself asking the same types of questions I normally ask myself while playing games.
I’m not examining the T-Virus’s feasibility, I’m not questioning the ludicrousness of
decaying corpses somehow retaining enough brain functionality in their rotting heads
to move, nor am I rolling my eyes at the absurdity of necrotic tissues and cells maintaining
cell respiration somehow enough to move--I accept this!
I ACCEPT ZOMBIES AS MY LORD AND SAVIOR.
Between CRISPR, autonomy-robbing funguses, and ferality-inducing viruses, I’m willing
to accept, for now, that zombies could exist.
Let’s just take that as a given.
Instead, I’m curious about what an actual Zombie epidemic would look like; specifically,
if we accept zombies as possible, how would it actually happen?
Could they reach epidemic or, god forbid, even pandemic levels?
Or would the zombies fizzle out into nothingness in a matter of days due to being complete
garbage at life?
Cracked, of course, has already argued that it would fail miserably due to the advanced
training imbued upon us by a media positively flooded with zombie movies, zombie video games,
and zombie TV shows that somehow continue to release seasons in spite of their genuine
terribleness.
I agree, it’s pretty likely that if any of us saw a real zombie right now, we’d
know exactly what to do.
I stab her in the brain with a wooden stick.
But what if we weren’t trained in all ways zombie-extermination?
What if we weren’t living, breathing, genre-savvy zombie destroyers--what if, instead, Zombies
were like any other new disease we next-to-nothing about, like Ebola, HIV, or Zika when they
first appeared?
Well, before we do that, and believe me, doing that is fucking AMAZING, we have to go over
a few parameters first.
Resident Evil has a particularly interesting zombie apocalypse scenario compared to others.
Like most modern interpretations, the source is viral: the T-Virus.
In 1966, a virus called the Progenitor Virus was discovered somewhere in Western Africa.
And the decide to take that virus and turn it into the next wave of human evolution.
Of course, things didn’t go as planned, blah blah blah, fast forward to the 90s and
it’s been turned into a biological weapon designed to wipe out entire combat zones without
sending in soldiers by turning the enemies into walking corpses.
Tada!
This biological weapon is renamed to the T-Virus.
The T-Virus infects a host’s cells, burns through their available resources, and moves on.
It causes permanent brain damage and unstoppable body-wide necrosis, and essentially turns
humans into feral beasts that irrationally crave the flesh of the living.
Even more terrifying, for some reason it isn’t limited to infecting living tissue, and can
effectively reanimate the dead, although the difference between someone who was infected
as a dead person and someone who was infected while alive doesn’t seem to be that great.
Tl;dr, the virus turns folk into zombies.
Cool.
Means of infection, now here’s where stuff starts to get pretty damned interesting.
Bites from infected zombies can, of course, spread the virus to whoever’s bitten, while
also probably ensuring their immune system is hella compromised from being bitten by what
is, effectively, rotten meat with teeth.
Unlike most games and stories, however, this isn’t the only way folk can become zombies.
The T-Virus, while predominantly spread by other zombies, is also a waterborne illness,
and can also be spread by vectors like mosquitos and rats, not unlike malaria and the black plague.
So, humanity’s fucked, right?
Well, not necessarily.
Interestingly, a whopping 10% of the population displays a complete immunity to the T-Virus.
They simply can’t be infected with it.
This, THIS is the beautiful nugget we needed all along.
This upends every variable in traditional models, and makes Resident Evil a vastly more
complicated universe than most.
But before you can understand why, first we have to talk about Epidemiology.
Epidemiology is exactly what it says on the tin: the study of epidemics.
Epidemiologists study the spread of infections of every kind, from things as simple as the
common cold, to world-changing diseases like the Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
By studying maps, hospitalization figures, symptoms, transmission-vectors, and general
demographics, epidemiologists build complex interlocking mathematical models that help
put together patterns that can be analyzed.
If you can find the patterns behind what spreads disease, you can hopefully address
it and reduce the risk of spreading infections.
Among the many, many tools on the utility belt of these nerdy superheroes lies an incredibly
powerful one that, unfortunately, is incredibly boring to the average person:
differential calculus.
So.
How can we marry calculus and epidemiology with video games?
Simple.
Statistical Epidemic Modeling.
I present to you my brainchild; my masterpiece.
The thing I’ve been working tirelessly on all week and have lost sleep over tweaking
and perfecting, and my latest attempt to merge Nate Silver’s economics brain with the world
of Video Games: the SInZD model.
The SInZD model is your one-stop shop for all things T-Virus related.
Let’s break it down.
It’s based loosely around what’s called the SIR model, short for Susceptible, Infected,
and Recovered, but with way, way, WAY more parameters.
The SIR model is used to predict the spread of simple diseases where healthy people get
sick, and eventually recover by placing people into three specific categories, and people
move between these categories based on coefficients that are proportional to each other.
For example, susceptible people are way more likely to get sick if there are more infected people
walking around.
Conversely, more people who are already sick are constantly getting better moving from the infected
category to the recovered category and people in the recovered category can't get sick and do not
get other people sick.
Zombies, however, work completely differently,
so I needed to build my own epidemiology model, and here it is: SInZD, short for Susceptible,
Infected, Zombies, and Dead, this model actually has five buckets people can fall into, as
opposed to the SIR model’s simplistic 3.
Let’s go over the moving parts really quickly before we get to the good stuff.
Susceptible folk are the same as the SIR model, and they move from Susceptible to Infected
based on a transmission coefficient.
People move from Susceptible to Infected in proportion to the number of zombies there
are since Zombies are the primary vector for infection.
Infected move from the infected bucket to the zombie bucket based on a steady rate proportional
to its own size, since there’s really no factors that control the conversion other
than the available pool of people with the T-Virus inside of them and time.
Now here’s where it gets interesting.
People who are immune are in their own side bucket, and they forgo the infected and zombie
buckets entirely, and enter a whole new one: permadeath, since they can’t be converted
into zombies, but can still be killed by them.
THIS coefficient is half the coefficient of susceptible folk that become infected, presuming
that half the people who encounter zombies die, and half get away alive.
However, living, breathing humans aren’t likely to just let a zombie try and kill them
without fighting back, so there’s an effective reduction in the zombie population that reduces
in proportion to the total number of living humans--folk who manage to successfully destroy
a zombie’s brain move them to the Permadeath bucket.
Success!
And that’s it.
So.
How do we use this to realistically model a zombie apocalypse?
Simple!
We just need to know our factors.
The outbreak in Raccoon City was at its peak in just over a week, with most of the population
succumbing to the T-Virus or death from zombies in the first couple of days.
So we plug our coefficients in, hit enter, and BOOM.
Zombies have successfully invaded our excel spreadsheet, and can give us a pretty accurate
picture of what happened in this poor, poor town that extends beyond what you see as one
single character.
And this picture is god damn terrifying.
Things go to shit really fast, so we have to look at this by the hour.
If Raccoon city starts with a mere 50 zombies compared to their population of 100,000, at
first things are going relatively well.
Humans are getting attacked, for sure, but the panicked humans are actually managing
to keep the zombie population in check, and they actually reduce the total infestation
by half in the first 8 hours.
But then...well.
You see, someone unfamiliar with zombies isn’t likely to know to go for the brain, especially
within the first quarter of a day of dealing with zombies.
You probably don’t even know what they are.
You’re just putting them down, and putting dead people in a pile to be dealt with later.
But about 9, 10 hours after the initial outbreak, shit starts to go fucking wrong.
The bodies that you had in a pile that all died in that first wave start to get up, and
there’s way, way, WAY more zombies than there were before.
In the next ten hours, the number doubles and then doubles again.
Twenty four hours after the first zombie bit the first person, things are starting to get
out of control.
There are over 9000 infected or dead people that’ll turn into zombies, and while there’s
only about 300 or so walking the streets, soon, very soon, shit is about to get real.
Hour by hour, more and more zombies stand up and start biting people, and by the time
48 hours have passed, a little over 500 people of the original one hundred thousand are still
alive, 9700 of them are zombies, and nearly 80,000 of them are corpses or infected on
their way to increase the zombie population.
FUCK.
This explains the setting of Resident Evil 2 & 3 pretty well, though, and why you very
rarely run into another person at all throughout the course of the games.
So what happens next?
In Resident Evil 2 & 3, you, the protagonist, are just trying to get out.
You’re not trying to end the crisis.
You’re not trying to find the source of the outbreak, the cure, and you’re not trying
to save the world--you’re just trying to put as much physical distance between you
and the fucking brain-munchers as you possibly can.
Thankfully, the United States government’s got “saving the world” covered, because
God Bless Democracy, God Bless Thermonuclear Weapons, and God Bless AMERICA.
Recognizing that the situation is outside of their control and getting more and more
chaotic, 9 days after the first handful of zombies showed up in Raccoon City, Uncle Sam
wipes the town off the map and turns its streets to glass with nukes.
That seems...like an extreme, unwarranted reaction.
Right?
WRONG.
If you truly have zombies this tenacious, allowing them to get a foothold as solid as
an entire town the size of Raccoon City has cataclysmic consequences.
If the United States decided on a no-nukes policy, here’s what would happen: adding
in a new modifier that accounts for a more widely-dispersed population of 84 people per
square mile, and providing that, over time, people get much better at not dying, the entire
United States would be completely overrun by flesh-eating monsters in little over a
month.
And after that time, even if people died over 95% less to zombie attacks and got 1000 times
better at fighting them, the entire world would be reduced to two percent in just six
months as zombies took over everything.
In fact, by the time the United States falls, a nuclear response becomes less and less effective.
With constant bombings that kill only zombies and no people, the remaining humans at six
months would be only 4%, as opposed to just two.
In order to stop the spread of zombies to the entire world after the United States has
been eliminated, foreign powers would effectively have to carpet-bomb the entire United States
with nuclear weapons every ten days like clockwork.
Only then could they eventually mop up the remaining zombies using humans.
The zombies eventually reduce to nothing in less than a year, but at a huge cost;
even with those nukes 81% of the entire human population is dead bt the end of the zombie crisis.
This is a mass-extinction event for humans.
As seen in almost every projection, zombie pandemics don’t happen because people are
stupid; they happen because the onset of zombies escalates so quickly that half of the population
is fucked by the time anybody’s even remotely figured out what to do.
What lesson does Resident Evil teach us?
The lesson here is that, if zombies ever do come, you have to hit them fast, and you have
to hit them hard.
You can’t give them a chance to get a foothold, because every hour means the chances of recover
decrease exponentially.
So, remember, if you ever, EVER see a zombie
stab it in the brain with a wooden stick and get your friends to do the same.
Because otherwise, you’re putting the entire world at risk also you should be washing your hands
more frequently.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
Hey!
See this shirt?
Isn’t is awesome?
Want one?
WELL YOU CAN’T HAVE ONE.
Just kidding.
But soon I won’t be.
You see, these shirts, along with some other swag, are only available for the month of
October, which is almost over, bitches.
So if you want one, you gotta act fast, because after October 31st, there won’t be any left.
Then how’re you gonna show your SCIENCE! pride?
Going to college and getting a master’s degree?
Sure, but, you know.
This is easier.
And cheaper.
Just head on over to crowdmade.com/shoddycast and pick out what you want.