Simulation

"Perhaps I should write about Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!," I mused. "But of course they can't play this thing, since it's not only out of print but incredibly obscure, and basically no copies are available anywhere."

No problem; I emailed JFD and got his permission to put the game up here.

It seemed appropriate to wait until now to release a light management game about being a mutating virus that destroys all of humanity. This is the game Prince Phillip was born to play.

The game gives you a world map and lets you look at different countries, the shading of the countries shows you how deeply infected the populations are. You simply spend evolution points earned with infections over time to buy and sell symptoms, making your disease as transmissable as possible without being too noticable and triggering a global panic. Then once you´ve gotten in to every major region, you can mutate into an extremely deadly condition that nearly wipes out humanity. A globalist aesthetic replete with a conspiracy-chic soundtrack loop gives the game a thriller feel even as you sit back and watch.

Of course, this is a fairly shallow game were it not for the psychological effects, made ever deeper now, of dealing with the collective dissonance of pandemic paranoia. Once you´ve decoupled emotions of fear and panic from the underlying mechanics of pandemics and virology, you should read some of the material describing evidence that this whole Swine Flu thing is a big scam at best, or at worst an atrocity of overruled personal sovereignty where the cure is more lethal than the problem.

(N.B.: Not to be confused with the boardgame Pandemic.)