There is, of course, a swine flu game. Last Monday, web entrepreneurs Jude Gomila and Immad Akhund created Swinefighter (swinefighter.com) as a marketing tool for their game-embedding technology. The browser-based timewaster requires you to zap flying pigs with a huge hypodermic needle as they zoom about a world map.
Ironically, the developers employed viral distribution, via Facebook and Twitter, and by last Wednesday 150,000 people had played the game. By Thursday it was up to 750,000. "Our biggest country is Mexico," claimed Akhund. "A lot of people feel helpless right now; Swinefighter gives them something to do while they are stuck indoors, and a sense of hope."
The satirical browser game has become a common reaction to major world events over the last five years, with the rise of social networking sites allowing for superfast global distribution. Kids used to make up tasteless jokes in the playground, now they hack together Flash games.
But games may have more important things to say about contagion than this. Nine years ago, when The Sims was still in its infancy, the developer, Maxis, made a range of downloadable extras available, including a pet guinea pig. Unbeknown to users, the rodent was designed by creator Will Wright to be a sort of embodiment of the computer virus. If the virtual humans in the game failed to look after the animal correctly it would bite and scratch, infecting its owners with a flu-like sickness that could be communicated to other sims in the same household. Victims would recover if rested, but if not, they died. Maxis was flooded with complaints.
In 2005, a boss character was introduced into the online RPG World of Warcraft, who could infect players with "Corrupted Blood", eventually killing them. The virus was supposed to be contained in one area of the game, but players found a way of spreading it, and it infected thousands of avatars on several servers. Two researchers used the incident to study infectious disease epidemiology in social groups, ie, how people react when threatened by a deadly outbreak. Some players tried to set up quarantines, some deliberately spread the disease, others stayed in infected areas to heal the sick. It was the perfect model of human behaviour in the face of panic.
Again, the wave of complaints that followed taught us that the unpredictability of illness runs counter to the strict, rule-based structure of most game worlds. Conversely, it says something about why games like Swinefighter will crop up in situations like these. It is all about control. In games it should be constant. In life it almost never is.
