Pandemic+II

The game I am going to review is a game called Pandemic II. Basically, the point of the game is to create a disease that will spread across the entire world and kill every human being. The player creates a disease with a few attributes and it begins in one country or region, there are about 20 regions in all and in order to spread the disease, a person with the disease can travel by plane, boat or walk across borders. There are several elements to this game. First of all, the players wants to disease to spread to other countries, but without being detected until it is too late. If the disease is visible and a region recognized it, they will close their airports and harbors so that the disease cannot spread to them. Essentially if the region closes all travel to them before anyone in their region gets affected, the player will lose because the player will never be able to affect that region. On top of spreading it quietly, one also has a race against the clock because the humans will begin to develop and then deploy a vaccine and once it is completely deployed, the disease is cured and no one new can be infected. A player can add and subtract symptoms as well as make the disease more resistant to drugs and nature to help it spread and kill. In order to win the game, a player must strategize correctly and add symptoms at the appropriate time. Because the game is fairly simple, the tutorial is very short and really only tells how things work, not how to beat the game. Therefore, really the only way of learning I experienced in the game was the probe, hypothosize, re-probe, and rethink cycle. The first time I played the game, my disease was far too visible and regions cut travel off very quickly. I only spread my disease to 4 regions. Following that experience, I realized how crucial it was to make my disease as invisible as possible. Eventually, I even removed all symptoms so that the disease would be least noticeable, even with this, the best I was able to spread my disease was to 18 of the 20 regions (places like Madagascar and New Zealand are hard to spread to!) Over the hour and a half I played the game, I slowly got better, but still was unable to perfect the process. Despite this, my entirety of learning done in this game really was to the probing cycle mentioned. As far as teaching, the game taught me through rewards and punishments. The better I got helping my disease spread undetected the more successful I felt. However, if I got too bold or waited too long, the humans would begin to cut off travel or start on a vaccine. This taught me to try a different strategy next time because the one I had tried was not completely effective. The game also paced its teaching as well. Early on, one can buy and sell symptoms quite quickly, however, the game quickly taught me that if I didn’t use my disease points effectively, later on I would regret it as it became harder to develop or change my disease. Overall, I think that the game is fun and frustrating. Which I believe is the basis of a good video game. It was not too easy that I quickly discovered how to beat it, however, there were rewards along the way and I did see myself getting better and learning from past mistakes. The game forces the player to keep trying and adapting strategies in order to spread the disease. I believe that this is a very useful educational game. It would primarily be used in a science class to be sure, however, I also believe that it could be used in my content of social studies to discuss the spread of ideas and religions. Specifically for science, however, I think that it could be very useful to discuss how a disease spreads and what we humans do to prevent these diseases before they become too deadly. Currently, this game could also be used in both science and social studies classes to look at current events and see what the world has done in regards to the Ebola virus. This could be a very effective way for students to deal with the concern of that virus in a hands-on way and also understand why humans decided to deal with it the way that we have.