Virus Game Instructions

Playing the Game

Players in this game are told to meet as many people as possible without getting sick. You can only meet each other player one time. The catch is that no one knows how you get sick. Start the game by entering your name in the start screen (see the general instructions page). It is critical that everyone start the game at the same time, so after entering your name, wait for the rest of the class to start. You can meet other players by lining up your Palms and having ONE player hit the Meet button (one person is the sender and the other is the receiver). The machine will keep track of your meetings (make sure everyone enters a unique name), and the number of meetings.  Only the initial meeting with a person counts. At any point in time if you don't want other people to meet you, you can press the READY button, which will toggle to say LOCKED. In this mode you can neither send or receive meetings.

If and when you get sick your machine will beep a few times and your happy face will turn to a sad face that says SICK.

To start a game, go to the virus menu in the upper left, and click on new game.  It will kick you back out to the name screen with your name already filled in.  Everyone should start the second round together. You cannot play with other players if you restart your game while other people are playing the first game, your machine will not communicate with theirs.

Game Parameters

There are many parameters that you can set in this game. Some are optional and others are mandatory. In order for the game to work well you will need to create three kinds of people - Regular, Immune and Patient Zero.  The regular people should be all set by default.  But remember that you'll need to make sure that all of the players play in the same mode. You should designate one player as Patient 0 (the person that starts with the virus) by checking the appropriate box. Patient 0 has some extra incubation time that you can set below. Patient 0 also gets sick by default, but you can uncheck this box so that they don't. You also should check one or more players to have Immunity. By default immune players do not carry the virus either. You can change this if you'd like.

A complete explanation of the parameters is given here:

• Patient 0 - determines if the player starts with the virus
  • Gets Sick - determines if patient 0 every shows "SICK"
• Multiple Meetings - allows players to meet other players more than once
• Immune - determines if the player is immune to the virus
  • Immune Carriers - allows immune people to pass the virus along to others
• Incubation Time - how long on average it takes from getting the virus to showing sick
  • Variation - how much (random) extra time it could take before showing sick
  • PO Additional Time - how many extra seconds it takes for Patient 0 to get sick
• % transmit virus - the probability of passing the virus from an infected person to a healthy person
• Recover time - time it takes to recover from being sick (0 means there is no recovery)
  • Immune after recovery- if people recover determines if they are immune afterwards
• Game mode - which round the game is in

Information for Instructors

In facilitating, remember that less is more.  Don't give out any information in the beginning (e.g. Can immune people pass the disease?  Is the first person immune? Can we meet people after getting sick?)  even if the answers seem obvious.

People should wear red/green nametags if possible and turn them to red when they are told that they are sick.  This will be indicated by a sick display on your screen and an alarm.

By default the rules are as follows:

• There is a 2 minute incubation time with a variability of 50 seconds.
• Patient zero takes an extra 100 seconds to get sick.
• Long haired people are immune
• Immune people can't pass the disease.
• There is a 95% probability of transmission.

When playing the game we usually have the first round simply meeting people and seeing what happens. After the first round we ask, "What Happened?" Then do some probing and ask some more directed questions like “Why didn’t some people get sick?” sometimes this is directed at the few people that don’t get sick, or the whole group.

Then we coax them towards “What do you want to figure out?” And write those things down.

Then we say “If I could reset everyone and play again what would you do to figure this out?” We try not to steer the group towards any particular experiment, but after some time (10-15 min) we try to steer them towards getting some sort of consensus on an experiment to run.

We then tell them how to play a second game (go to the menu in the upper left and select new game). After that game we again ask “so what happened?” “what did you learn?”

If there is time for one more experiment we go through a second iteration.

Discussion in the end can be based on specific diseases (what disease does this represent and why?), epidemics, scientific method, population growth, and many other topics.