This was not a column I had planned. Which is apt. Because I finally caught the thing that showed the world you couldn’t plan anything: Covid.
I had joked before that I wanted to get Covid because I would finally have time to sit and play all those games I wanted to. The reality was different, because we have a high-risk middle child, an eldest who had it once and is now Covid paranoid, and a wife who has had it twice so badly she can’t hear the word without breaking into a sweat.
I was therefore banished to the basement along with our also-infected youngest child. That’s where she lives anyway, because at 17, child and parent need to be as far away from each other as possible. So, she had her lovely bedroom with a neat TV and a big fat Xbox One. I quarantined in a large cupboard that normally houses the cat litter trays, with an air mattress and an iPhone. Think about that as you sit on your Secretlab Titan Gaming Chair.
I turn to my lord and gaming saviour: Apple Arcade. An RPG or strategy game seems the way to go with all this time on my thumbs and the first to appear on a search shows that the algorithm has developed a sense of humour.
Plague Inc.
Seriously? A game about spreading a plague while I am suffering from the worst one ever?
Covid banjaxed me in ways so mind-altering that it was difficult to separate fever dreams from reality for 48 hours, not helped by the fact that I was simultaneously researching a radio show which involved listening to all Pink Floyd’s albums up to and including Wish You Were Here. This would be mind-altering without the affects of Covid, paracetamol, codeine, ibuprofen and whisky, alongside the litany of anti-anxiety, antidepressant, and sleep medication I scoff down daily.
It’s therefore possible that I imagined playing the game, as quarantine meant nobody was in the forest to see this tree of a man falling. Judge for yourself with the following flashes of memory.
The tutorial started the plague in China and asked me to name it. I called it Gout. Because I have it and I don’t like to suffer on my own.
The mechanic is gorgeously simple. Pop the bubbles to get DNA points. Spend the DNA points to make your plague grow in three ways: transmission (give it to things), symptoms (make it screw up bodily things) and abilities (change its science … er … things to hamper a cure).
When you infect about 20% of the world, the bubbles pop up so fast it’s like playing Guitar Hero. This should be morally alarming but it’s too much fun, even when trying to infect enough humans to accrue enough DNA points to produce necrosis so that decapitated bodies spread my plague more readily. That said, it was heartening to see the entire world put aside their differences to find a cure for Gout. Unlimited cheese consumption may not be a pipe dream after all.
It’s an interesting choice to make such a serious game so full of humour. I sweatily giggle at news ticker headlines such as: “Yo-yo attacks becoming more common” and “Man runs with scissors, 12 hospitalised”. My sides almost split when it described the UK as “a wealthy country with high-quality healthcare”.
I fail to kill the planet on the first game because I spread my plague too quickly; kill too publicly, and the world is alerted too soon. I also took my foot off the gas when everyone was infected, slipped into a fever sleep, and woke to find the plague cured. What a rubbish Marvel villain I’d be.
On my next go-around I decide to play smarter. I select the UK as my plague base. The disease seems to start in Scotland. Just like it did with the poll tax.
This time I concentrated on strengthening Gout in secret. Not infecting people too quickly, making it resistant to environments and research and learning from my own life to make it target the brain with insomnia that builds to insanity. A plane takes Gout to the US, where they appear to be super prone to madness and refuse to cooperate with the global cure effort. Who knew?
Soon the UK is destroyed. 68,692,366 dead. That makes me sad, because James Corden is in the US. But he gets it in the end as I wipe out the world in 584 days, with those losers just 55% of the way to a cure.
For game three I switched sides. This was more challenging. The biggest problem with beating a plague is … people. You have to keep them compliant. You can do this through lying and suppressing information to keep them scared and ignorant, but I have a feeling I’ve seen this tried before, so instead I threw money at research and public information early on. Then I diverted tons of resources to income support and job furloughs so folk could stay safely at home and observe lockdown. It’s easy when you can learn from the worst.
I saved the world in 230 days. With only 5,170,000 losing their lives I can officially declare Plague Inc. to be the most fun you can have with Covid. Put that on a billboard!
