Video Games vs. COVID
How a game inspired by Among Us teaches lessons about dealing with COVID
Pandemics have often provided a dramatic setting for games. Asobo’s
A Plague Tale, Arkane’s Dishonoured, and, of course, every zombie game ever made. If you are my age, you may also have fond memories of Pandemic 2, the inspiration for Ndemic’s cult hit Plague Inc. Away from the screen, Matt Leacock’s Pandemic has become one of the most successful board games of all time.
Given the cultural and educational importance of games, it is unsurprising that our current pandemic is providing a setting for more than entertainment. Researchers at the University of Lancaster developed Point of Contact to examine people’s understanding of COVID precautions.
I talked to Dr. Abe Karnik, the mastermind behind the project, to find out more.
Among Us with COVID
Karnik had the idea of using video games as a medium for understanding pandemics back in 2017. However, the project never really got off the ground.
In 2020, Karnik pitched the idea to some of his students. The students ran with the project and produced Point of Contact, inspired by Innersloth’s cult hit Among Us.
Karnik reminisces:
“Among Us was becoming very famous at that time because many people were playing it. We had AOC from the United States going on there and playing it to use it as a platform.”
Swap the spaceship with an office environment. Swap the impostor with symptomatic and asymptomatic carriers. Add a realistic model of transmission and preventative measures, based on government advice. Now you have Point of Contact.
The similarities to Among Us go beyond mere homage. Adapting an existing set of mechanics makes the design process easier and the product more effective. As Karnik himself points out, Among Us itself is inspired by a long tradition of social games, such as Mafia and Werewolf. By tapping into these tried and tested mechanics we tap into the underlying psychology as well.
According to Karnik:
“When you are trying to engage an audience with a more serious concept […] you still need the hooks. You still need the mechanisms through which the player stays engaged with the game.”
The Results
With the game developed, the next step was evaluation. Get people to play the game, observe their behaviour and see how their attitudes have shifted.
The first thing the team noted was that players tend to underestimate the risk of viral transmission and overestimate the effectiveness of preventative measures.
Players were particularly bad at social distancing. Atrociously bad. To make matters worse, players were apparently unaware of just how bad they were. Although players understood the importance of social distancing, they violated distancing rules, on average, eight times more than reported. It has long been suspected that humans are awful at social distancing, but it is difficult to prove. Point of Contact may not help fix the problem, but it can help to identify it.
It’s not all bad news though. Social distancing aside, Point of Contact improved players' receptiveness to preventative measures. Primarily, this was achieved by helping players to understand their effectiveness more accurately.
As the paper concludes:
“The results of the study indicate that the participants altered their perception towards COVID-19 preventive measures and that they would consider taking them more seriously.”
Most strikingly, Point of Contact appeared to be shifting players' political opinions.
The results suggested that playing Point of Contact encouraged players to prioritise health over the economy. This came as a surprise to Karnik:
“We never really imagined this would be one of the results. We had this as one of the questions but we never had any explicit requirement for them to talk about it.”
Games as guardians
Due to COVID limitations, the team could only test Point of Contact on a small number of players. So, it is important to take the results of the study with a pinch of salt. However, games have been teaching us valuable lessons since time immemorial.
Chess has been a training tool for both ancient and modern militaries. And the oldest known board game (the Royal Game of Ur) held important spiritualistic lessons for its ancestral players.
Karnik himself likens it to Moksha Patam, the great grandfather of Snakes and Ladders.
“The idea with that game was that every ladder was associated with a good deed.[…] Every snake’s mouth was a bad deed, taking you away from an afterlife of righteousness. […] But It doesn’t preach anything. It just gives you a direct consequence of actions.”
I’d argue that Point of Contact goes even further.
It may not be preaching, but Moksha Patam is making an explicit moral statement. The ladders represent virtues (generosity, faith, and humility) and the snakes represent sins (anger, murder, or lust).
Point of Contact doesn’t make a moral proclamation. It never dictated whether the players should prioritise health or the economy. It gave the players a system and they came to that conclusion themselves.
It is perfectly possible to play Point of Contact prioritising the economy score over the health of the players. Yet, overwhelmingly, this was not the case. Through play, the participants conceptualised information in a new way and untangled the false dichotomy of “health or the economy.”
As the pandemic drags on, it has become increasingly obvious that “saving lives versus saving livelihoods” was a gross oversimplification. In fact, economics and public health are intertwined. Although lockdowns cause short-term economic shocks, the long-term effects of rising infections are far more severe.
If the public had digested this concept earlier, would governments have acted more decisively to protect the wellbeing of their citizens?
By providing us with a safe environment to explore our ideas, games help us to conceptualise complex data. Ultimately, they make us better decision-makers. If leveraged intelligently, games have the power to make us smarter, wiser, and more empathetic.
They may even help us survive a pandemic.
To give Dr. Karnik the last word:
“The medium is agnostic. It’s for the game designer and the scientist to decide the best way to use it to improve the lives of everybody.”
