Plague Inc.
Plague Inc. obviously has an antisocial agenda that educators probably wouldn’t want to promote, except perhaps for the reaction of countries to the problem and the race to find a cure. If the developers had given teens the option to play as a government official or research scientist rather than genocidal criminal, this app could be used as a learning tool without reservations. It's just a weird, backward way to learn about the spread of disease.
Continue readingPlague Inc. is an app that asks players to create and evolve a disease that kills the human race before a cure is discovered. Gameplay shows teens how disease spreads across the globe through air travel and cargo ships, as well as how vectors like animal hosts or "abilities" like airborne transmission make diseases more contagious or resistant to medicines. Teens can learn about world geography through the map interface; about biology through disease types, transmission, symptoms, and abilities; and about society and government through tickertape news stories and statistics pages for each country showing responses and actions to the disease.
An opening one-page tutorial clearly explains the basic steps of gameplay, distilling a great deal of detail down to its elements. Players first select a country in which to start their disease. Players strengthen their virus, fungus, or bio-weapon by adding symptoms and giving it defenses –- against cold and water, for instance. Players get points and upgrade their virus by "popping" bubbles that appear on screen. Once doctors become aware of the disease, they work on a vaccine.
While some teens will be fascinated by the intense music, detailed graphics, extensive data, and the slow red spread of contagion and death, others may find it too intense and disturbing.
Overall, gameplay is quite passive physically, aside from popping DNA bubbles to earn points toward evolving the disease, but teens must do a quite a bit of reading and thinking -- though it's not clear how much impact this has on the results. In-app purchases to unlock DNA codes are easy to make inadvertently depending on your device and settings, and the text is way too small. In the free Android version of the app, ads (for dating and violent games, for example) can be eliminated with an upgrade to the full version via in-app purchase.
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South Jordan, United States
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