A game which challenges players to spread a deadly virus around the world has been banned in China, its makers have said. Plague Inc. In a statement, Ndemic Creations said: "We have some very sad news to share with our China-based players.

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By Josh K. Elliott Global News. Posted January 28, pm. Updated January 28, pm. Smaller font Descrease article font size - A. But just how the game has gone, well, viral, in recent weeks demonstrates that the app is also tapping into the wider consciousness too.

And it is not something that the developer Ndemic Creations have shied away from. Strategy consultant James Vaughan set up the firm to develop Plague Inc.

But the recent outbreak has also hit Ndemic hard. They are working and need your custom. Games are particularly suitable for epidemiological narratives due to their structural characteristics: in simple terms, all games can be regarded as interactive conflict simulations.

Only a conscious decision within parameters given by the software enables the player to walk through the assumed text of the computer game. These procedurally circumscribed conflict situations allow socio-cultural expressions of a scientifically guided assessment of future developments.

This special feature makes Plague Inc. This perception is true to the point that the developers had to stress that Plague Inc.

The central point here is that games in a formalised form represent conflict situations of reality that can be learned and experienced without the risk of endangering oneself.

For this reason, games are often integrated into narrative structures and aesthetics that refer to conflicts in the reference world. From this perspective, areas of reality with an extremely high density of action decisions and a high effectiveness of the decision consequences are particularly suitable for adaptation in games.

This applies primarily to war simulations, but also to scientific and especially biomedical settings, since fictitious individuals and societies are influenced at a central point of their respective autonomy, namely the physical integrity of their participants.

In Plague Inc. From a design perspective, this complex mixture is dealt with on three game levels: the environmental conditions of the virus, human research, and finally the internal development of the pathogen.

The result of the interplay of these three levels is in turn mainly displayed on a world map in the form of an abstract spreading course. In all levels, an attempt is made to show the respective sub-processes as a mechanical-logical process which is ultimately subject to a radical logic of quantification.

Soft values and affects, such as empathy but also fear and panic, are either subjected to this logic or find no way into the equation.

This is done both within an informational realism on a visual level as well as structurally, by referring to traditional knowledge.

The in-game dashboards on the health political status of individual countries take up established forms of data visualization, as they can also be found in the context of the Covid pandemic, such as the representation of national disease patterns in the context of the Covid pandemic by Johns Hopkins University see figures 1 and 2.

Design, knowledge and expectations of this knowledge go hand in hand here. In the following, this will be demonstrated by means of the macro-perspective visualization of the infection pathways, the statistical calculation of the infections based on the SIR model and the micro-perspective representation of the reconfiguration of the disease characteristics.

These are relevant because they are the most important means of transmission besides animal carriers, namely via ships and airplanes.

Non-contaminated connections are shown in white, whereas connections with pathogens are shown in the warning colour red.

The increasing complexity of these connection lines leads on the one hand to a better overview for the player, on the other hand the complexity of the propagation paths is gradually increasing and overwhelming.

The quantity of influencing variables and the constant influx of changing environmental factors establish a time lapse that builds up and increases in complexity, putting the player under pressure and creating tension.

The infection of the population is — again, similar to the visualization done by Johns Hopkins University in fig. The stronger the red colouring of the country, the more extensively the population is infected.

If the disease is fatal, the colour changes to a dark red, post mortem the infection point fades, so that the map is almost emptied again towards the end of the round.