The COVID-19 pandemic created a lot of uncertainty for students as they moved to virtual campuses. Therese Mills and Tuyet Pham, senior students at MIT, faced an uncertain future as they began their summer break, but they were both driven to channel that anxiety into something productive.
They found that opportunity through MIT’s Social Impact Internship program. A long-time partner of the program, the Naval War College (NWC), was interested in creating a game to simulate situations like COVID-19. This opportunity appealed to Mills, who is a mathematics and computer science student, and Pham, who majors in electrical engineering and computer science. They both wanted to apply their skills to the pandemic effort.
“I personally wanted to do something about it, but something that played to my strong suits,” Mills said. “I was searching for internships when I came across a position with the Naval War College, and it seemed like a great opportunity to get involved [in pandemic response] while using math and computer science, my majors.”
Similarly, Pham felt the project aligned with her skills and interest.
“I’ve always been interested in creating games,” Phan explained. “It seemed like an interesting way to tell people that this situation is really complicated.”
The game is based on an existing game called Urban Outbreak 2019, which is a war game. Urban Outbreak was designed for civilian and military organizations to improve disaster response operations. Pham and Mills adapted the game for a general audience. Their goal was to inform players about the communication and coordination required to manage humanitarian efforts. The simulation was inspired by COVID-19, but the details are different.
To have more control over the dynamics of the game, Pham and Mills built the game without using existing game authoring tools.
“Tuyet was very ambitious and insisted on starting from nothing—just have a blank file and build from the ground up,” Mills said. “I think that was the best decision we could have made. Everything in the game is exactly how we wanted it to be.”
It is a single-player game, but players are encouraged to play as a group and discuss different strategies. Although there are multiple ways to survive the simulation, it is a difficult game. The player’s goal is to manage the outbreak while maintaining good relationships with key stakeholders, managing resources, limiting morbidity to below 75 percent, and maintaining a government satisfaction score above 20 percent.
At first glance, these metrics may seem generous, but the simulation game proved to be difficult. There are no correct answers, and suboptimal decisions at the beginning of the game can be dramatically compounded later. The game is broken into three phases, which can be reset if the player loses. This allows players to experiment with many different solutions.
Pham and Mills playtested the game with family members, who found the game to be challenging.
“We also found out that it was difficult for them to get past a certain point in the game,” Pham said. “The game of tug of war between the player and the notionalized bacterial Olympio-plague was pulling harder toward the plague’s side.”
In the end, even if you cannot beat the game, its purpose is to communicate the importance of coordination and communication in such a situation. It does accomplish that. If you would like to see if you can navigate a nation through a pandemic crisis, the game is available now to play.