I’m truly astonished by some of the video games that are popular nowadays. In particular, I stumbled across a flash game called Pandemic II last night. I haven’t played any online games since I entered college, so I was startled by how advanced flash games have become. This may be old news for you, but the interfaces are now nearly as good as desktop games with a high degree of functionality and depth. But that’s not the only thing that shocked me.
Pandemic II is a game that encourages you to think like a terrorist who aims to wipe out every single human in the world. For no reason. The author may have left that unmentioned so that you could play with your own ideology as you bask in the pride and glory of kiling off the population in each country.
In the game, you pick a disease and upgrade/manage its traits like resistance and symptoms as it accumulates evolution points. The point is to maximize infectivity and lethality while minimizing visibility. Makes sense, right? You essentially beat the game if you can kill the president of Madagascar within the timeframe, since the island country Madagascar is the most difficult country to penetrate in the event of an international quarantine.
Am I the only one nervous that we have hundreds of thousands of people enjoying online games like this? Violent games like Grand Theft Auto are one thing but games like Pandemic II take inappropriateness to the next level.
On the other hand, Pandemic II highly interests me because it has relevance to what we study in Security and Risk Analysis at Penn State. Although it has many exaggerated and sci-fi elements to the gameplay, in one aspect playing Pandemic II would be similar to learning how to use keyloggers and network sniffers in SRA 221.
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