Plague Inc. Adding Anti-Vaxxers After Successful Online Petition

Whoo boy, this one is gonna be difficult to cover while avoiding controversy. Okay, here we go. The developers of Plague Inc. have indeed announced on Twitter that they’ll be adding anti-vaxxers to the game. They’re doing this in response to an online petition calling them to do so. The developers said they would include anti-vaxxers if the petition reached ten thousand signatures. At the time of writing, the petition is still ongoing, and has collected almost twenty-two thousand signatures. And, well, Ndemic Creations is going to make good on their promise.

Now, without going into opinions here, I’m gonna say that the inclusion of anti-vaxxers into a disease simulator is a perfectly justified move. In case you don’t know what Plague Inc. is, let me get you up to speed. It’s a game in which you play some kind of disease: virus, bacteria, prion, etc. You earn DNA points which you use to evolve your disease, boosting its infectiousness and resistance to medicine and elements. Oh, and increasingly serious and deadly symptoms. The aim is to infect and kill the entire world population, while scientists scramble to find a cure. It’s grim, it’s disturbing, and I’ve been playing it relatively regularly for many years.

So, all of that said, I repeat, anti-vaxxers absolutely have a place in a game like this. The whole world is now seeing a resurgence of diseases like measles, and it seems to me like the general agreement is that it’s happening because parents aren’t vaccinating their kids. And, yes, I am curious to see how this will work. I’m assuming it’s going to be one of the official scenarios, along the likes of Swine Flu, Smallpox, Global Warming, and Mad Cow Disease.