Containing Ebola Like They Did in This Video Game

Note to Self

WNYC Studios

Self-improvement, Tech, Note, Npr, Education, Public, Wnyc, Manoush, York, To, New, Self, Radio, Business, Technology, Relationships, City, Society & Culture, Zomorodi, Newtechcity

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2014

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Public health officials need to be able to predict how outbreaks like Ebola spread and grow. But that's not so easy. Mainly because it requires knowing how real people will react. Human behavior ain't so easy to plug into a computer model. But, then there was this bizarre and totally accidental video game incident that made real life disease outbreak modeling smarter. The story of "corrupted blood" in World of Warcraft is still inspiring epidemiologists.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, friend. This is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Text City.
0:06.6	Same good content, just the old name. Enjoy.
0:09.9	This is WNYC's New Text City, where digital gets personal. I'm Anusha Marodi.
0:16.0	This week, what video games have to do with Ebola and containing it?
0:30.8	I want to tell you about one of the most popular video games out there.
0:34.5	It is really gross and super morbid.
0:37.6	The plague wasn't like anything we had ever encountered before.
0:41.6	It came out of nowhere, spreading undetected.
0:45.6	It's only symptom of tiny cough.
0:49.2	We think patient zero became infected in Africa, but we can't be sure.
0:54.0	The game is called plague. Your goal is, yes, to spread a virus that keeps mutating.
1:01.0	And Demick, the company that makes the game, says that 35 million people have played plague.
1:06.7	It's like risk, but with disease.
1:09.4	So you have to pick a country to start in, and then there's different things that pop up,
1:12.5	and you have to stop the researchers from finding a cure, and you have to just,
1:17.2	and you get points every time you infect a new country.
1:19.6	One of those players is 19-year-old Alina Mamba.
1:22.8	And she admits that the best way to make the virus spread
1:26.4	is to pick a poor country with a big population and a weak government.
1:31.2	Alina loves plague.
1:33.2	Or I should say she loved it past tense.
1:36.4	I'm really bad. I thought you'd think about it.
	...

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