The portrayal of sickness in video games

One of the most famous games of all time, SimCity (and its sequels and spinoffs) has a mechanic where people get sick and have to go to the hospital. There are conditions that change how effective your response to sickness is, but in general, the idea is that you build more hospitals to house more people and have more ambulances. The ambulances then go through the streets and, barring traffic, reach their destination.

There are even some versions of this game that have the "zombie apocalypse" disaster as one of the player-generated city destroyers. After all, one of the most fun things to do with a city in a video game is to destroy it Godzilla style.

But no version of the game, as far as I've played, has a pandemic disaster. Zombie apocalypses aside, I think there is an underrepresentation of pandemics in video games. There are plenty of pandemic movies, and there are video games dedicated to pandemics, but there are very few games where the point is not the pandemic (IE, Plague Inc), and still features one.

That's because true pandemics are spoilsports when you're trying to build a city or make friends with townsfolk. How terrible would Animal Crossing (a popular town simulator series by Nintendo) be if it featured a pandemic that caused everyone to stay inside and killed your friends?

We simulate war and violence all the time. It's not that we're averse to the idea of video game characters dying. It's just that pandemics are, at their core, no fun. There's no way to fight them except the push to develop vaccines. How are you supposed to turn that into a game? And if your game isn't pandemic-focused, how are you supposed to rationalize a feature that could bring a player's experience to an unfun, grinding halt?

Games are meant to be played for fun, and playing as the humans in a pandemic in a game not specifically about pandemics is a spoilsport type of experience.

I do realize there are games that are dedicated to pandemics. Plague Inc is an example I mentioned previously. But that game is a morbid interpretation of a global pandemic situation where the player's goal is to kill as many people as possible. That goal is, somehow, fun, as long as the people stay numbers and stats and the game remains at god-level separation from the realities of what living in a pandemic would be like.

Pandemics spoil the fun, both in real life and in video games. Perhaps we can learn from this and put a little more representation of what it's really like inside our media from here on out.

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