Animated Covid Game/Simulation

In this game, the user is responsible for public health measures to protect a village with a thousand residents, served by businesses, industries, houses of worship, and recreational facilities. As a game player, you take charge of the public health response to the disease. You control the measures designed to control the spread of the virus: closing bars, clubs and workplaces, quarantining and contact tracing, and requiring mask wearing. The choices you make can check the spread of the covid-19 virus within the village. Unfortunately, some of these decisions will be unpopular. The point of the game is to reduce the spread of covid, save lives, and prevent illness. The secondary object is to impose as few disruptions on the life of the community as possible.

It doesn't matter what your experience with the game was like. We want to hear from you.

All people infected are potentially infectious, but some people are more infectious than others, and all infected people are infectious only at certain points in the progression of their illness. When determining who does or does not get infected, the game takes distance, ventilation, and volume of breath into account. If you look carefully at the spaces representing the various bars, clubs, offices and industrial workplaces, you will see they have lines at their edges, indicating the level of noise (noisy spaces cause people to speak more loudly, facilitating the spread of Covid), and ventilation. You can determine crowding by observing the number of people in the space. All these factors will affect your decisions about which facilities to restrict, and which facilities to leave open.

The game is scored based on political capital. You start with a fixed amount of political capital. All the actions you can take, from closing entertainment venues to requiring masks, will cost you capital: closures result in economic losses and mandates provoke public resistance. On the other hand, if you do nothing the rapidly spreading disease will leave most people sick at home, send enough people to the hospital to overflow the wards and the intensive care unit, and send an unlucky few to the graveyard. Funerals and jammed hospitals, with patients cared for on gurneys in the halls: these will also cost you capital. If your capital drops to zero, you lose the game.

The game runs for a maximum of 100 days. If you make it through the 100 days with capital left, you win. The goal is to win; the ideal is to win with as much capital as possible.

Before you start the game, you can choose the various options:

• There are several levels of political capital available. The easier options provide more capital.
• You can start off with nobody infected, or with a seriously infected person about to enter a house of worship.
• You can select the speed of the game.
• You can allow yourself to see who gets infected the moment they catch the virus, or you can play with a more realistic simulation in which you don't know who has the virus unless they test positive or get sick.

The game display gives you a display of the villagers (pictured below) going about their lives, from their homes to work, to worship, and to clubs and bars. You can follow the infections and the progress of the illness, see the villagers go into isolation, into hospital, to intensive care, and for an unlucky few, into the grave. The display includes a table giving numbers of sick people and other information about your status, as well as line graphs giving measures of your progress, including the score.

Note: Some browsers have a known graphic peculiarity which can cause the display to appear choppy or slow. Browsers known not to have this condition include Microsoft Edge and Chrome/Chromium.

It doesn't matter what your experience with the game was like. We want to hear from you.