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Some video games feature virtual pandemics as part of their game play.
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When this happens, the outcomes suggest people haven’t learned much from real-world public health scares, including the recent COVID pandemic.
Video games are actually a good place to study and look for changes in human behaviour during a pandemic, because the consequences of everyone getting sick and/or dying pose no actual risk to the public.
Here is a recent interesting example of this:
Last month, the video game Dragon’s Dogma 2 (DD2) was released worldwide.
Within this game, there is a mechanic or system — meaning the rules that define how the game is played and how characters interact with one another — called “dragonsplague.”
DD2 is a classic sword and sorcery-style action game featuring dragons, gryphons, swords, bows, fireballs and the like.
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To achieve objectives, the player will often recruit “pawns,” which are computer-controlled allies.
They are the main vector of the contagion featured in dragonsplague.
A virtual party of four characters that play the game consists of: the main player, the main player’s pawn that the player customizes, and two pawns that are the main pawns of any other two players in the world that have downloaded them into the game.
Basically, instead of playing with one’s friends directly, as is common in video games, people play with the customized pawns of other players.
There are two main ways of contracting dragonsplague:
The first is pawn-to-pawn: if the player downloads another player’s pawn that already has dragonsplague, it will “‘spread” to the entire party.
The reverse can also occur.
If a player’s pawn is downloaded into another person’s party that is infected, that pawn can “return home” with dragonsplague, to infect others.
The second method of infection is dragon-to-pawn: The player fights a dragon in the game and the dragon uses a specific attack, which infects the pawn with dragonsplague.
This second method effectively makes players that enter the game late, “patient zero” in the spread of the disease.
Symptoms of dragonsplague include glowing red eyes or the pawn berating or insulting the player (normally they view the player very positively).
In the first instance of encountering the contagion, a popup tutorial titled “dragonsplague” appears, which explains part of the game mechanic.
In terms of consequences, if a player sleeps at an inn while a pawn has dragonsplague, the pawn will go on a serial murder spree and kill every person in a large radius in the town — vendors, the innkeeper, critical quest givers, a potential love interest — basically destroying the playthrough, forcing players to restart their savefile entirely.
How does one prevent the plague from spreading?
Once a player notices the symptoms, but before they sleep in an inn, they need to throw the pawn off of a ledge into open water, allowing them to drown, and then re-summoning the pawn, now instantly cured.
Pawns regularly perish and are re-summoned, making it a common occurrence in the game.
Keep in mind that all a player has to do to protect themselves from the plague, is to recognize the glowing, red eyes of infected pawns before they go to bed and throw them off the cliff.
If they do so, they are good to go. If not, the entire town dies.
When downloading a pawn, players can see if their eyes glow red and not download any that are infected.
For a variety of reasons, many players are incapable of doing these things as dragonsplague has spread virtually around the world and are asking that the feature be removed because of their frustration that their playthrough will be ruined.
This despite the fact they could manage the pandemic they are confronted with simply by ensuring their pawns take a regular “bath” when they look “unwell.”
As things stand, many players appear to be averse to simple hygiene.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this evolves over time and how people will adapt, or not adopt, to this virtual pandemic.
— Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp, teaches Disaster and Emergency Management at York University and is the author of Continuity 101. He can be reached at info@prepared.ca.
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