Video Game Review: Plague Inc.
By: Kendall Haney,
Staff Writer
There have been movies like Outbreak and Contagion that give a visual representation of just how easy it is for a micro bug without a ticket to hitch a ride on an international flight bound for Somewhere, Earth. Plague Inc., a video game easily downloaded from iTunes onto most iPads for the low price of US $.99, puts you in the cockpit as you indirectly control the virus through evolution and de-evolution at the genome level. Mad scientists everywhere with a flair for war-play will eat their brains out as the addiction to this game sets in.
The game is straightforward enough to play without an instruction manual. You start out as a lil' baby germ and infect the country of your choice. As a player’s baby bacteria hits a growth spurt, it unlocks different types of infectious disease spreaders. Things like viruses, and fungi, and bio-weapons. Gamers can kill people even better and faster as their plague grows up! The best part is this simulation is entirely realistic.
At different levels of gameplay, one can choose to become a virus, a fungus, a parasite, and more. Later, one gains DNA points by infecting people and bonuses for infecting entire countries at epidemic levels. A gamer uses these points to evolve the plague.
Points allow the gamer to acquire symptoms such as nausea, rash, cysts, insomnia, anemia, and coughing. In short, you can almost smell the pus in the air. In later gameplay, the symptoms evolve to get worse and even more disgusting, and sometimes even lethal. Many of these symptoms are very common to the worst flu ever. There are other bonuses to earn like being antibiotic resistant, or being cold/heat resistant.
The game does well in setting the stage to demonstrate over and over an infinite number of strategies a bug could use to engage in a ‘scorched Earth’ program of attack against humans. As the player pretending to be this virus (or at least its conductor) gains more experience, she can become far more adept at acquiring faster death rates. One must keep in mind that rich countries with good medicine and antibiotics are harder to infect, but the disease will be easier to spread through the world. Less-than-rich countries with poor hygiene and healthcare infrastructure are usually more isolated and it's harder to spread the disease globally, but they are easier to infect.
The plague is almost always spread via airplane and/or boat. Something very true of today's world as well. Different transmission vectors emerge after your initial travel. For example, diseases can be spread by rodents, birds, insects, livestock, blood, air, and water.
There are different graphs that demonstrate your germs’ success rate. These graphs measure how close humanity is to finding a cure, or how little science cares to even bother a research study.
In the end, the object of the game is to take over the world, and make sure the human race goes extinct. I personally find this game addictive, since I can't really put it down. Not to mention, it's kind of fun to wipe out the Earth.
We could maybe even learn lessons from this game. Lessons on just how easy it is for a germ to travel from place to place, person to person via global transportation and public areas. Kinda scary when you think about it.