Playing at apocalypse: Reading Plague Inc. in pandemic culture

Abstract

Plague Inc. is an enduringly popular mobile video game in which players create diseases and attempt to eradicate humanity; it has been downloaded more than 60 million times and been met with largely positive critical reception, with many reviews praising the game as a ‘realistic outbreak simulator’. This article explores Plague Inc. as both an artifact, and productive, of ‘pandemic culture’, a social imaginary that describes how the threat of pandemic increasingly shapes our day-to-day life. Ludic and narrative elements of the game were identified and selected for analysis, along with paratexts surrounding the game. Three aspects of Plague Inc. were used to structure the analysis: its politics of global scale, its viral realism, and its visual culture of contagion. The article examines how the ways in which Plague Inc. articulates ideas about pandemic may not only explain the game’s immense success but also provide insights into public perceptions and popular discourses about disease threats. The article argues that the game is an incomplete text that depends on preexisting familiarity with other disease media. It concludes that the popularity and longevity of Plague Inc., as well as its broader social relevance, can be explained by placing it within the context of public anxieties about vulnerability to infectious diseases.

How Gameful Experience Affects Public Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices Regarding COVID-19 Among the Taiwanese Public: Cross-sectional Study

“…Plague Inc. is a pathogen simulation game that attracts widespread public attention whenever a pandemic breaks out. This game introduces the public to epidemiology in an unconventional way, allowing users to obtain knowledge of the transmission and characteristics of pathogens through gaming [20]. As a form of new media, Plague Inc. employs simple graphics but has diverse charts and functions (Figure 1) [21].…”

Using Narrative Evidence to Convey Health Information on Social Media: The Case of COVID-19

“…According to Wald, pandemic narratives tell “a contradictory but compelling story of the perils of human interdependence and the triumph of human connection and cooperation, scientific authority, and the evolutionary advances of the microbe, ecological balance, and impending disaster” [ 62 ]. Further, Massumi [ 63 ] indicated that we live in an environment that is not so much threatening as “threat generating” [ 64 ]. That is, the threat is not always as existential as its effect on human consciousness, as expressed through the stories we tell.…”

A semiotic exploration of catastrophes in game worlds

“…Other games are set after a global catastrophe, such as the Fallout (Bethesda) series, which allows players to explore in detail a post-apocalyptic America with a distinctly 1950s and 1960s style. Finally, there are games that implement the catastrophe as the core of game mechanics: players might have to prevent it (like in Fate of the World, by Red Redemption, 2012, see also Idone Cassone [17]) or to cause it (this is the case of Plague Inc., by Ndemic Creations (2012), where the player must create and change an infection capable of zeroing the human population on the planet, see Mitchell and Hamilton [18]).…”