S1E10 - Pandemic (Epidemiology) - Gaming with Science

Episode Transcript
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Anna (00:00):
Music.

Brian (00:06):
Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast
where we talk about the sciencebehind some of your favorite
games. Today

Jason (00:12):
we'll be talking about pandemic by z Man games. All
right, everyone, welcome back togaming with science. This is
Jason,

Brian (00:20):
this is Brian.

Anna (00:21):
This is Anna.

Yann (00:22):
and Yann.

Jason (00:23):
So not only do we have a special guest, we have two
special guests this time today.Anna swetsu, actually, I don't
know that I can pronounce yourlast name, so I'll just let you
two introduce yourselves.

Anna (00:34):
Okay, so I'm Doctor Anna Szuecs, my last name is
Hungarian too. I'm a SwissHungarian doctor. I'm doing
research in mental healthcurrently at the National
University of Singapore,

Yann (00:45):
and I'm Yann Boucher. I'm a French Canadian originally,
and I'm a microbiologist bytraining. I work on microbial
evolution, infectious diseases,environmental surveillance and
whatnot.

Jason (00:55):
And so you can probably guess why we have Anna and Jan
on here is because this is agame about medicine and
epidemiology and the spread ofdisease. Before we jump into
the game though, we like to dofun science facts. We always
offer our guests the firstopportunity something
interesting. You've learnedabout science lately. You want
to share?

Yann (01:10):
Okay, I've got a scary one for you. Have you ever watched
the TV show? The Last of Us?

Jason (01:15):
I've heard of it. I haven't watched it.

Brian (01:16):
I know it exists. I know it's based on the video game.

Yann (01:19):
Yeah, yeah. So the first scene of the show is the best
because they it's a fakeinterview, like in the 1960s of
two microbiologists, one's amycologist, you know, one's a
virologist, and they're askingthem what's most dangerous. And
of course, the virologist says,Okay, it's the virus that's
gonna kill us. There's gonna bea pandemic. And the other guy,
that mycologist is not afraid ofthat at all, and he says it's

(01:39):
gonna be the fungi. But thevirologist says, not a fungi.
They don't grow at bodytemperature. This only do skin
infection. It's not a problem.The mycologist says, Yes, but
what if the world was going toget a little warmer? What would
happen? The fungi would evolveto be temperature tolerant, and
then what happened? We lose thisis the best scene You should
watch it. I played in everyevery one of my classes.

Jason (02:01):
Okay, so basically, "the last of us" came about because
climate change inducedadaptation of parasitic fungi.
That is, you're right, that iskind of scary,

Yann (02:08):
Which is actually happening for real. The new
Candida Auris in hospitals isactually the hypothesis, is that
it evolved tolerance to highertemperatures in marshes and then
got transferred to cities in thehospital. So there's an
hypothesis, but it probably hasstarted to happen. I don't want
you to lose sleep over it, ormaybe you should.

Anna (02:25):
Maybe that's a good inspiration for a next edition
of pandemic as well
climate change as a factor.

Yann (02:31):
Yes,

Anna (02:32):
the special fungi edition,

Yann (02:34):
at least 50% of infectious disease are aggravated by
climate change. So there you go.

Brian (02:38):
Yeah, I think we're lucky as vertebrates that fungi are
not that much of a problem forus. For every other living
thing, plants any arthropod likefungi are a major, major, major
issue,

Yann (02:49):
For now, not a problem for us. Yeah.

Anna (02:53):
But there was a recent study where they have given
fungi, like some like roboticlegs, or like, a little way to,
like, move forward, and then,like, it grew inside and
actually managed to move so, youknow, just to add a little bit
into the scare,

Yann (03:08):
Anna's married to a robotics engineer.

Brian (03:10):
Very cool. We'll have to get your husband out at some
point when we have the rightgame for that too.

Anna (03:13):
Yeah, oh yeah, of course, with pleasure, he's also a big
board game fan, so I'm surethere will be occasions.

Jason (03:19):
Alas, we already did Robo rally. Otherwise, that would
have been perfect.

Brian (03:22):
So I had one too. I found out I was looking at a study
from 2022 that showed the impactof the black plague on human
evolution.

Yann (03:28):
Oh, this is so amazing.

Brian (03:30):
You know the study?

Yann (03:31):
I don't know that one in particular, but I have other
example with cholera. Basically,the selection is so strong that
the ratio of different bloodgroups and the Ganges Delta is
completely different in othercountries, because having a
certain blood group gives youresistance to cholera. So that's
just how much you knowinfectious disease shape human
population. I'm sure the plagueis similar, right?

Brian (03:47):
Yeah, it was similar. Yeah. They actually so they used
ancient DNA. They actuallysequenced the genomes of human
remains from different places inEurope, both before and after
the plagues had come through,found enrichments in certain
genes in the post-plaguepopulation, a very strong
signature in a small number ofimmune genes. Were then able to
test those immune genes inmacrophages in a test tube, and

(04:08):
showed that those wereassociated with effective
clearing of the Yersiniabacteria, and those same genes
are also associated withincreased risk for rheumatoid
arthritis, Crohn's disease andother autoimmune diseases.

Jason (04:18):
So they basically, they put it in a white blood cell in
a test tube, and found wasbetter able to get rid of the
bacteria. That causes bubonicplague. Yeah, it's better to get
rid of the disease, but it alsois more like to go haywire and
attack ourselves. Is that right,

Brian (04:30):
basically. So it's always kind of, we're probably getting
too far afield, but the parts ofyour immune system that would
fight off parasites are oftenassociated with allergies. This
idea the immune system is in andof itself, can be hazardous to
you when it gets out of control.

Anna (04:43):
Yeah? And then things that were evolutionary advantageous a
few centuries ago may not be soanymore in the current
situation,

Jason (04:51):
yeah, we talked about this with evolution. How
evolution is not forwardthinking. It reacts to what's
good now,

Yann (04:55):
just about surviving today, right? Yeah, yep.

Jason (04:57):
All right, let's start talking about pandemic. So
pandemic is designed by MattLeacock. It's published by z Man
games. It's probably, as far asI can tell, it was the first big
cooperative game to really gobig, at least here in the US.
And if you're not familiar withthat, a co op game is one where
all the players are actuallyworking together to try to beat
the game before it beats you.And so you usually either all

(05:18):
win together or all losetogether. Not surprisingly,
there's usually many ways tolose and only one way to win.
But pandemic has held out prettywell. It's been out since 2008
so 16 years the time ofrecording. It's number 149, on
Board Game Geek, so pretty wellranked. But it's also had a
bunch of spin offs, so it's hadits at least three legacy games

(05:38):
which these are ones you playover a long period of time, and
the game changes the more youplay it. This is actually how
Brian and I got together forgaming. Is that we played Season
One of Pandemic Legacy, whichhas been holding steady at
number two on Board Game Geekfor years.

Brian (05:51):
That's crazy.

Anna (05:53):
I played also the that first edition of Pandemic
Legacy, and, yeah, with someother physician friends, and we
got traumatized because we lostso badly, like in one of the one
of the, like, later chapters, atone point we had, like a strike
of unlucky roles and card flips,and everybody just died. Oh no,

(06:14):
that was our experience.

Jason (06:15):
So aside from the legacy ones, it also has other spin
offs. There's a Cthulhu version,because there's a Cthulhu
version of everything. There'sone about water in Norway, not
Norway, Netherlands,

Brian (06:25):
the Netherlands. I've played that one.

Jason (06:26):
You can tell they've got the pandemic engine at the core,
but they're different enoughthat they're different games.
But for this one, we are talkingabout just core pandemic, the
original one. And the idea ofpandemic is you've got a global
map. There are 48 cities aroundthe world divided into four
sectors, each of which issuffering from some sort of
disease. They're just fourcolors. They're not named.
You've got blue, red, yellow andblack. And the idea is that you

(06:47):
are people that work for theCDC, the Centers for Disease
Control. So you start inAtlanta, Georgia, which is nice
and close to home to us, andthen you're going around the
world trying to cure thesediseases before they basically
trigger a global meltdown. Andso you've got to go around
collecting research cards,removing diseases and treating
them, trying to keep things fromhappening. And everyone is
working together, but you havelimited moves, so you've got to

(07:09):
try to plan out how it goeswell. And each player gets one
of in the core game, sevendifferent roles, each of which
lets you do things a little bitbetter. So like the scientist
card lets you cure a diseasewith one fewer card the
dispatcher lets you move otherpeople at a better ratio so that
you've got more mobility. Mypersonal favorite is the
quarantine specialist who juststops disease from happening
near her. That's just because Ilike a proactive play style. I

(07:33):
like being rewarded for lookingahead and saying that's where
the problem is going to be. I'mgoing to set myself there. And
when Brian and I played this inpreparation for this, that
worked out like I sat myselfdown and we prevented a few of
these outbreaks, which are someof the loose conditions. So
that's really it in a nutshell,like at its basic it's a
relatively simple game. You goaround the board, you collect
stuff, diseases get worse. Everynow and then, these outbreaks
that make things get worse. Andone thing that we've always

(07:55):
noticed is they did a reallygood job of balancing the game.
It always seems that when we winthe game. It's because we're
only about, like, two turns fromlosing the game. Yeah. In fact,
the very first time I playedthis, we were on our last turn.
We were going to lose at the endof that person's turn, and we
just happened to get the rightcard. We needed to win. But it
was a real narrow biter there.Yeah,

Anna (08:15):
it's always very dramatic. It's like, it keeps your
adrenaline level very high,because you were always on the
brink of disaster during thewhole game?

Brian (08:25):
I honestly don't know how they have balanced this so
expertly. I have never won agame that wasn't at least two
turns from losing. It almostseems like it's mathematically
calculated, so that the numberof actions that you can take,
the number of cards that youhave, you will always either win
or lose within inches of eachother, or centimeters, I
suppose.

Jason (08:43):
As far as gameplay, this is one of my favorite games,
like this and Robo rally are toptwo games. I love this because I
love the Co Op, I love thechallenge, I love the puzzle. I
know some people don't likecooperative games because it's
easy to get what's called analpha gamer, where there's
basically one person who tellseveryone else what to do. And I
know people where that'shappened to them, so yeah,
that's true of all Co Op games,though. The solution to that is
you still play with that person,yeah,

Anna (09:04):
but I guess that person would also be just unpleasant to
play with if it wasn't a co opgame, right? If you have an
alpha player who is a sore loserand, like, just wants to win at
all costs, then that would notbe a very pleasant playmate
either way.

Jason (09:18):
Yeah. So advice, if you are that alpha gamer out there,
just step back, maybe giveadvice. But the rule we always
have at our table is that otherpeople can advise, but
ultimately, whoever's turn itis, they get final decision.

Brian (09:28):
Pandemic is interesting because it kind of predates
escape room culture, butfundamentally, you're kind of
doing the same thing. This ideaof a cooperative puzzle solving,
this is probably the game I'veplayed the most, if we're
counting the legacy games, and Ithink we should, particularly if
we count all of the spin offs,maybe I've played Catan more,
but it's gotta be pretty close,

Jason (09:47):
all right. So I think that's enough about the game.
The transition here, as we gofrom Board Game to science
behind the board game is thatthis is one that all of us have
real world experience. We've allactually lived through. A real
pandemic. And my take home fromthat is the pandemic the board
game is easy mode. It isactually so much easier to fix

(10:08):
things in the board game than itwas in real life, because the
diseases stay put. They're notjumping borders, so apparently,
only the players are actuallyusing airplanes. Everyone else
has shut down all air and seatravel. And like the diseases,
you got four of them, but we cantake care of them. And like, the
outbreak in this city, but somecities never get touched. And
it's like, no, no COVID showedus, once it gets going, if it's

(10:28):
communicable, it goeseverywhere. And so this is where
I'd want to hand it off to ourexperts and ask, like, how good
a job does this go of showinglike, how do we compare
pandemic, the board game, topandemic, the horrible situation
we live through a few years?

Yann (10:41):
It is a bit difficult. But one of the things, for example,
in pandemic, there's also, it'seasier to eradicate a disease
than it is in real life. We onlyhave ever eradicated one
disease, smallpox. We came closeto measles. But, you know,
because of anti vaccinesentiment, and also because of
COVID, because vaccinationcampaigns stppped, we didn't
manage to could we do it in thefuture? Probably. But we haven't
eradicated many diseases, right?So that that's one thing that's

(11:03):
harder in real life than in thegame. But it's true, the
containment aspect is easier inthe game than in the real life.
But then again, right? You lookat COVID, and it was one of the
most transmissible virus we'veever seen, right? We'd even, we
didn't see that coming at all.If you take SARS one, for
example, the first one thathappened in 2000 that was less
transmissible, and we managed tocontain it, right? It just only
went to a few countries, Canada,Singapore, China, but it didn't

(11:24):
spread everywhere in the world.MERS is the same, right? It was
extremely lethal, but not astransmissible. So it varies a
lot. I think, I thinkSARS-CoV-2, too, was an extreme
in that, in that terms oftransmissibility, because it's
more like the common cold,right? Or flu, very, very
transmissible and spreads aroundthe world, but just a bit more
lethal, right? The really lethaldisease don't tend to be as
transmissible, like Ebola, forexample, it's nowhere nearly as

(11:45):
transmissible as that. So, Imean, I think they do a good
job, right? But they don't coverthat sort of SARS, COVID, two
pandemic that is not as lethal,but, like, really spreads like
wildfire.

Anna (11:54):
Yeah, I think it's also, you know what you mentioned,
Jason, that this game wascreated way, way before we had
pandemics with these type ofviruses. So probably that's also
why it's a bit more optimistic,maybe about, like, how a
pandemic looks like. And it'svery satisfactory in the game,
because you really feel like youare eradicating diseases. But
also the, you know, the otherpart of that is that you have

(12:15):
these, like handful ofscientists, like everybody has a
different role. They can getjust go to any country. They
have no problem, like, there isno no competition between
countries. They can just dowhatever they want, whatever is
needed to be done to eradicatethe diseases. So that's another
part that's like, probablyoverly optimistic based on what
we've seen with COVID,

Yann (12:34):
yeah. I mean, the eradication is based on 1000s
and 1000s of peoples and expertsworking together, different
countries collaborating witheach other, right? So that, of
course, in the game, thatwouldn't work, right? So that's
why you play a character. But,yeah, that's one big difference.
Like, Anna is saying with thereal world,

Anna (12:48):
yeah, like in the real world, it was politicians
thinking about maybe attackingother countries, vaccine
supplies, or, you know, I don'tthink that nastier part is
reflected in the game.

Yann (13:00):
Maybe they should add a politician card or something
like that.

Jason (13:04):
There is an expansion that introduces a bioterrorist
so that is no longer fullycooperative,

Brian (13:09):
the traitor.

Jason (13:10):
Yeah, the traitor. Maybe that's part of the nature. It is
a cooperative game, and COVIDshowed us that on the global
scale, not everyone'scooperating. There's a lot of
competition, a lot of othermotivations there, and some of
them have good reasons behindthem. It's just there's a lot of
things people have to balance inthe game. You have one goal,
stop the disease. In reality,there's stop the disease,

(13:30):
there's keep the economy going,there's don't open yourself up
to your hostile neighbor andkeep a good face on the public
forum and get re elected, andall these other things that are
competing with that one goal.

Yann (13:43):
And it's also not putting that much weight on individual
action. They all relying on theexperts in the game, when, in
real life, actually, the personthat plays the biggest role is
you, your behavior.

Jason (13:52):
Yeah. And that brings us to, so if I had to pick a
specific field that this gamerepresents, probably
epidemiology, so the spread ofdisease. And Can y'all give us a
feel like, what? What doesepidemiology cover? Like, what
is the nature of the field? Whatdoes it look at? What do
epidemiologists do?

Yann (14:07):
Okay, I can take that one. I'm not an epidemiologist per
se, but I work with otherepidemiologists. I mean,
basically, epidemiology isgathering data on multiple
factors like population size,behavior of people, prevalence
and incidence of diseases, andthen trying to to model the
spread. I know how fast itspreads, how far is likely to
spread, and model that into thefuture. So the epidemiology is

(14:29):
tracking a disease, but there'salso a boots on the ground
epidemiology, which is maybe abit more like in pandemic like,
for example, I worked with theCDC on the cholera outbreak in
Haiti, 2010 I don't know ifyou've heard about it, but in
2010 there was a massiveearthquake in Haiti that
destroyed most of theinfrastructure, right, uh,
National Palace crumbled. Therewas millions of homeless people
at that time, living in tents,right, at basically a tinderbox

(14:52):
for any infectious disease, likelots of people close together,
no no facilities, nothing. Andthen six months later, a cholera
outbreak started, which was verystrange, because they had not
been cholera i n Haiti forhundreds of years. The bacteria
wasn't there. And a realepidemiologist, Renault Piero,
is a French epidemiologist,actually went there. He flew
there, and he gathered real dataon the ground, right? He talked
to people, he looked at thecases, he looked at the timing,

(15:14):
and what he figured out is thatit was this UN Peacekeeper
battalion that had basicallyarrived from Nepal a couple of
weeks before the outbreakstarted, and there had been a
cholera outbreak in Nepal. Now,normally you have medical
screening for the army beforedeployment and how that managed
to escape. And somebody fromNepal brought cholera up to
Haiti, you know, moving with thebattalion, and then it spread

(15:36):
outside the camp, and then theylater figured out that it wasn't
good waste management, and itwent in the river. That guy put
all that together by talking topeople on the ground, gathering
data about the timing of whenthe infection started, and then
where are the first caseshappen, and gathering all that
data to put together the puzzle,right, like a detective,
basically. So so someepidemiology is just working the
computer at the hospital,looking at the numbers for the

(15:56):
disease in differentcommunities, and then the
different risk factors and allthat to predict who's more
susceptible, how long it's goingto last, how many people are
getting infected. But there'salso the person on the ground
that she gathering fact anddoing detective work as to where
it came from and how it gottransmitted. So there's a range
in epidemiology in terms ofinfectious disease.

Anna (16:13):
And also, maybe one other point here is that it's very
variable how much data isavailable by country, and some
countries report their data veryopenly and can gather data, data
very, very fast. Scandinaviancountries, for example, you have
national databases that willrecord everyone's diagnosis,
like every medication thatpeople will get from the

(16:34):
pharmacy. So it's very easy tokind of keep track of diseases
there. But then there are somecountries where you get barely
no data, and it's not alwaysbecause they don't want to
disclose it. Sometimes it's justbecause it's so hard to gather,
because they don't have theinfrastructure to get fast
efficient epidemiologicalsurveys. That's also part of
what poses problems. Sometimes,when you need to eradicate the

(16:55):
disease at the global scale, isthat sometimes you don't even
know where the disease is.

Yann (16:58):
Yeah, I've got a good example, actually this. This is
just some work I've donerecently, so I work a lot with
the CDC in the US you werementioning. I've got some some
good collaborators and friendsthere, and we look at the
disease vibriosis. So this isthe disease when you can eat
oysters or seafood, getgastroenteritis, or you swim and
you have a wound and then get aninfection, and you can get
necrotizing fasciitis. For thosethat not know what it is, it's

(17:19):
pretty disgusting.

Anna (17:20):
That sounds disgusting

Brian (17:22):
is that flesh eating bacteria?

Yann (17:24):
Yeah, basically, basically Vibrio vulnificus. So they're
all under the umbrella of thisVibrio is because it's similar
species of bacteria that causeit. And in the US, there's the
best reporting system in theworld. No equal it's a
reportable illness. Everyhospital is gonna send their
data to the CDC. They havebeautiful data, like very
detailed. There's even one casewhere a guy was doing
windsurfing and he got struck bylightning, and his hands were

(17:46):
burned. He fell in the water,and then he got an infection of
Vibrio vulnificus, that flesheating disease in his hand. So
it goes into that detail.

Jason (17:52):
Oh, that poor guy.

Brian (17:53):
He rolled multiple ones, multiple crit fails.

Anna (17:57):
Guy's story could be a one hour discussion he would tell

Yann (17:59):
so they have other ones that I can't talk about on
radio, other cases ofinfections. But here in
Singapore, for example, whereAnna and I are, nobody cares
about vibriosis. So I was verycurious, because usually these
diseases are more frequent. Thewarmer the water temperature is,
the more cases there are. And inthe US, it's climbing and
climbing because of climatechange. So I was like, why isn't
everybody dying of this? Herethe water is always like, 28-32

(18:20):
degrees. Everybody should begetting infections.

Jason (18:22):
That's 28 to 32 degrees Celsius for our American
listeners,

Yann (18:26):
yeah, yeah, sorry, I don't mean Fahrenheit.

Jason (18:28):
That's like 90 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly.

Anna (18:31):
Yeah, thanks for translating.

Yann (18:32):
Basically, it's like a warm bath. You don't get
refreshed going in the oceanhere. So I went knocking on the
doors of every single hospitalin Singapore and gathered the
data one by one, sign anagreement with each hospital. It
was a lot of work, and then wefigured out, actually, nobody
talks about it, but it's threetimes the incidence in Singapore
that there is in the US, whichmakes sense to me. And Hawaii is
the state in the US where it'sthe highest. And it makes sense

(18:54):
because the water is warmer,right? So, so data availability,
for example, in Southeast Asia,where we are, it's appalling. I
mean, Singapore is one of therichest countries, so they add
the data, but they don't alwayscollect it. But a lot of our
neighbors actually don't havethe money to collect that data,
so it could be a huge problem.We just wouldn't know about it,
right?

Brian (19:09):
I remembered hearing something so one of the symptoms
of COVID 19 infection was lossof sense of smell. So one of the
data points that people realizedyou could use to correlate with
outbreaks was the number of onestar reviews for Yankee Candles.
These very strongly scentedcandles, just like "this candle
doesn't smell like anything".No, you just don't have a sense
of smell right now.

Yann (19:28):
Oh, that's hilarious. So cool. It's so funny. What you
can extrapolate from data, ifthat type of data,

Anna (19:33):
even though I'm sure there are few confounders, like your
mental health statements likethat, this candle is not
relaxing at all, not working.

Brian (19:43):
So one of the simplifications in pandemic is,
of course, you've got thisglobal map with all these nodes
connecting the different cities.I've actually argued to Jason
before that this might be,almost be a geography game, as
much as this is anything else Ican tell you, it was helpful for
me to learn where certain citiesand places were. But I suppose
another. Real simplification isevery one of those cities is
treated identically. Every oneof those cities, when they hit

(20:04):
the same thing the sameinfection point, that's when
they'll outbreak the surroundingone. So there are a ton of nodes
on the map, but there's nodifferences between them, in
population, in infrastructureand anything like that.
Obviously, that's not true,yeah,

Anna (20:16):
for sure. And also, you know, like it's we saw with
COVID, that people travel aroundway more than the way these
cities are connected. Thoughit's not like, you know, Ho Chi,
Minh is only connected. I don'tknow, Taiwan, whatever. I guess
that you know the when you youdesign this type of game, you
also have to make somecompromises. Because, you know,
even though widespread airtravel was already a thing 15
years ago, yeah, there are somethings that you just cannot

(20:38):
capture in the dynamic, becausethere it's always a trade off
between having it hyperrealistic and having it like
enjoyable and well balanced. And

Jason (20:46):
I'd always say I'd rather take a fun game that makes some
compromises on reality than anaccurate game that compromises
the fun.

Brian (20:52):
Yeah, you want to kind of like tune that metaphor
appropriately based on whatyou're trying to achieve. And
you can go up and down thatscale like a lot.

Jason (20:59):
Now epidemiology is studying how diseases spread.
How do diseases spread? So inpandemic, all you do is, you
draw a card and there's suddenlya cube appearing on the board.
But in reality, like, I thinkpeople are familiar with COVID,
like it goes through the air andthrough dopplets. But what are
the what are the vectors wehave? What are the methods that
diseases spread among humanpopulations that we have to
watch out for when we're tryingto control diseases?

Yann (21:19):
So I would say is, there's a few main categories, right?
The airborne transmission isone, right, crowded spaces
travel, but another one. Forexample, it could be the
diseases are carried bymosquitoes, right? Talking about
dengue, malaria. So all these,these diseases that are viruses
that are inside mosquitoes, andthen you get infected when they
bite you, right? So these, howthey transmit is the mosquito
populace, be a specific speciesof mosquitoes that can carry

(21:41):
that particular parasite orvirus. And when the climate
changes, let's say it getswarmer, the mosquito expands its
own where it can live thatparticular species, and then the
disease spreads with it.Sometimes people can carry them
in their blood, travel, getbitten by a local mosquito, and
then that can be transmitted tosomeone else. But usually the
disease doesn't stay, becauseit's not super compatible with

(22:02):
local mosquito population, butsometimes it can take hold. If
the local mosquito population iscompatible with that disease,
then it can take hold, but it'smuch harder transmit that way,
so it's mostly through change inclimate. These, these type of
vector borne disease. Thenthere's the waterborne disease,
and that's probably one of thosethat we know the least about how
it's transmitted. Cholera, forexample, how does it move? Most
of the cholera strains originatefrom the Ganges Delta, and it

(22:23):
circulate there. It's endemicand then regularly gets exported
to other countries in Africa andSoutheast Asia and other places
when they don't necessarily havea great sanitation. So it can
take on the population becausethe waterborne disease and how
they get carried over there, wedon't know, probably an
individual carrying it that'sasymptomatic, and then that
introduces in the new place. Butthere's also hypothesis that
ocean current can carry it.There's some evidence that some

(22:44):
strains, you know, of these, ofthese, Vibrio cholera, could
travel from Asia to NorthAmerican and South American
coast through ocean currents.Hasn't been proven yet, but is
it possibly or to ship ballastsor through also seafood that get
transferred to the seafoodindustry? Let's say you have a
muscle farm or oyster farm. Youbring some oysters on Japan, you
could bring the disease thatway. So, so there's lots of ways

(23:06):
like that. So it depends on whatit how the disease is
transmitted, where it'sairborne, water born, or vector
born, right? How the outbreak is

Anna (23:12):
another factor I read about is that how much time the
pathogen can survive outside ofany organism. So if it can
survive a very long time, thereis a much higher likelihood it
will reach the next organism andget back.

Yann (23:24):
yeah, like Clostridium tetanii, like this is a very old
disease, right? tetanus, butwe're all vaccinated against it.
But actually, it's a sporeforming bacteria, right? So the
spores are really hard to kill.You can boil them. They're in
dead bird carcasses everywhere.That's how they spread. They
float in the air. There's verylittle you can do, right? And
the only way is to vaccinate usso we don't keep dying of
getting infected by tetanus. Soyeah, there's some, there's some

(23:45):
that are tougher than others,that's for sure.

Brian (23:47):
Yeah, these, uh, these Endospores that you get from
Clostridium, that you can getfrom some Bacillus, they are the
most resilient biologicalstructures that we are aware of.
They can survive massive insultsof radiation, chemistry, heat,
actually, the entire process ofsterilizing, the discovery of
how to sterilize things with anautoclave, for instance, is
based on being able to killthese spores from these specific

(24:10):
groups of organisms. They'rereally important in the history
of microbiology.

Jason (24:14):
Yes, these are right up there with the tardigrads for
the most resilient organisms. Sothese are the type of bacteria I
studied in my PhD. Were thesespore forming bacilli. And I
still love them because, like,they form these little spores,
and they're just little tanks.They can survive anything. And
Brian, I'm gonna say this is whythey beat the gram negatives.
They can form these spores.

Brian (24:32):
Well,okay, sure.

Anna (24:33):
Is this going to be a bacteria battle now?

Jason (24:36):
Brian and I have a rivalry.

Yann (24:38):
I'm gonna root for the gram negatives here. They got an
outer membrane. They're toughtoo.

Anna (24:42):
Yeah,

Brian (24:43):
I'm definitely a Proteobacteria guy myself.

Jason (24:45):
Okay, so before we completely lose our audience on
this little tangent among themicrobiologists. So, okay, so
you got a few ways diseasesspread. How about where do new
diseases come from? So somediseases, like, have been around
forever, and then some of themjust kind of like, pop in. Like.
COVID kind of popped in out ofnowhere. And so where do we pick
up new diseases from?

Yann (25:05):
Most of them come from animals because the disease that
can survive in humans is becausethey are adapted to living at 37
degrees and being happy insidethe body. So we usually they get
transfered from other animals,especially mammals, but but also
some others. So for example, theSARS-CoV-2 you're mentioning,
this comes from bat populationsthat carry viruses. So it's not
from nowhere, right? That'sthese viruses circulating for
hundreds of years, right? It'sjust, how does it get to human?

(25:27):
That's called a zoonosis whatmakes a transfer, when it
becomes able to reproduce in thehuman, that's when you get in
trouble. And sometimes it's justtemporarily, you know, and then
it affects some humans and itgoes away. But sometimes it's
maybe for good, like SARS,COVID, too, right? Maybe it's
here's to stay, or the commoncold, right? Then you become
adapted to humans. And now theydo human human to human
transition. But usually theyalways originate from other
animals. In first place, theAIDS virus is the same thing. It

(25:49):
used to be chimpanzees, gorilla.Now it's very well adapted. Just
spread human to human, right?But they all start somewhere
else.

Anna (25:55):
Something that kind of important to realize is that we
always hear that, oh, the virusmutate, and now it got adapted
to humans. And, you know, whenyou don't know much about
epidemiology, sometimes you justimagine this virus like, you
know, being a very mean littleorganism who is like, Hmm, I'm
going to mutate and I willinfect humans. But it's not
really targeted to anything.It's like viruses and like

(26:15):
microbes always mutate like theyare, just like they keep on
mutating, and most of themutations don't make them
viable, or don't give them anyadvantage. And then sometimes,
in some specific circumstances,there can be a mutation that
actually confers some advantageto that specimen, like, for
example, if something is in abat, a virus and mutates, and

(26:35):
that bat is in close contactwith humans, and that specific
mutation makes it just morecompatible with humans, then all
the circumstances are alignedfor that thing to just cross the
barrier between the species.

Yann (26:46):
If we were all vegetarian, we didn't use animal poop to
fertilize our crops, it would bea lot fewer infectious disease
because most of them come fromanimals, the plant bacteria,
they don't do anything to us.We're too different from plants.

Jason (26:56):
We're going to be talking about COVID a lot this episode,
because that is the pandemicwe've all lived in. But I am
curious, there have been otherpandemics, ones that have gone
through human populations, andhow bad was COVID 19 relative to
historical pandemics, like itsucks for all of us going
through it, but like inperspective, how bad was

Yann (27:13):
so I recommend this book by Carl Harper. He's an
historian of infectious disease,and he talks about the different
plaguesof history. And this bookis just shocking. It's called
plagues upon the earth. And youlook at smallpox and the plague
you were mentioning earlier, howmany people it was killing, it's
completely insane. You know,sometimes 50% 60% of population
dying from the disease yearafter year, decade after decade.

(27:36):
I mean, compared to this, SARS,COVID two, is not that serious,
the small box and the plague,horrendous, horrendous and
lethal disease. And now, theonly reason why we don't have
them around anymore is becausesmallpox we're able to vaccinate
against it and eradicate it. Theplague, while it's easily
treated with antibiotics, butthat's not the reason we went
away. We don't actually reallyknow why it went away. Oh, it's
reassuring. It's linked to fleasand rodents, right? The rodents

(27:59):
are some of the care and thefleas that bite you transmit the
plague. But we don't really knowexactly why, right? There's
still a little bit of playingaround, but

Anna (28:05):
not but even the, you know, the Spanish flu was
terrible, like, it was a bitovershadowed by World War One,
but still, like, the number ofvictims there was this
horredous,

Jason (28:15):
I remember hearing that the flu killed more people than
the war did, actually? Is thatright?

Anna (28:19):
Yeah, I think so. That's also what I read. It's just
that, you know, the two thingsare, you know, when people are
already like, they already areweakened by war and the
starvation and whatever, then,yeah, maybe it's also they're
not in the best of states toresist any infection.

Brian (28:32):
And wasn't it actually called the Spanish flu, because
Spain was not participating inthe war, so they were bothering
to report and record like it washappening everywhere. It didn't
come from Spain. They just gotblamed because they were talking
about it.

Jason (28:43):
If I remember right, the first report was actually on an
American military base, butyeah, it got named the Spanish
flu, which is why we don't namediseases after locations
anymore, because people use themto cast blame.

Anna (28:54):
Yeah, I think there were things that were like considered
PC back in the early 20thcentury, and are not anymore.

Jason (29:01):
Well, I want to know is, what did we learn from COVID 19?
I've been figuring that peopleare gonna be crawling over all
the data from COVID 19, becausethis is the first pandemic where
we had a ton of information.We're in the information age.
There was tons of websites anddata gathering genome sequences.
People are gonna be crawlingover this for decades. What did
we learn, like, what actuallyworked to slow the disease, and

(29:22):
what was maybe a good attempt,but it turned out not to be very
important. There's

Yann (29:26):
two main things that come to my mind. First of all, masks
can work really well. And Ithink people in Asia knew that
already, because where we livehere in Asia, when you're sick,
you wear a mask because youdon't want to infect other
people. You know, I remember, Iwas after the pandemic. I was at
a bus stop, and it was threeFrench guys. There's a lot of
French people in Singapore. Idon't know why, three French
guys talking to each other. "Ohyeah, the mask. They didn't do
anything, right? You know, wedon't really know if that
works." I'm like, "Dude, howmany times did you get sick in

(29:48):
the last three years? For me, itwas a big fat zero." And usually
I get, like, the flu three orfour times. So that's one of the
big one. I mean, that might notbe the case for all different,
you know, illnesses, butcertainly the airborne ones is
going to help. We learned that.Without a doubt. And the other
thing is vaccine technology likemRNA, vaccine is going to change
the landscape massively, andthat works, and it's much
quicker to make vaccines usingmRNA, you're going to see a lot

(30:10):
of vaccine coming out. So do mymoney. These are the two biggest
things.

Anna (30:12):
Yeah, I think there are also an increasing awareness of
certain epidemiological conceptsthat can be helpful for future
pandemics, such as like theflattening the curve theory that
if people protect themselves anddon't infect others, then
hospitals don't get overwhelmed.And actually you can just use
your healthcare resourcesbetter, even it means that you
will need to use them over alonger time. And

Yann (30:34):
also looking at wastewater, that is a really
good way to look at whatdiseases circling in population.
We've actually been doing thatin a lot of countries portfolio
for a very long time, but didn'tget that much attention. But now
it's very clear, if you want tosee, you know, a disease, that
you're not necessarily pickingit up, or it's coming back from,
from having a very low levellooking at wastewater is amazing
way to track and

Anna (30:52):
I think that you know something that's close to my
heart. I think there was areally huge increase in the
awareness about mental healthneeds of people, both children
and adults. And the number ofpublications about mental health
in all kinds of populationsreally skyrocketed during COVID,
and even in countries wheremental health was not really
something they were doingresearch on previously.

Jason (31:14):
Yeah, and I wanted to talk more about that cause of it
being your specialty, becausepeople obviously got a lot of
that. In fact, our fun sciencefact last episode was about how
video games boosted people'smental health during the
pandemic. So what did we get onthe mental side of COVID 19
then?

Anna (31:27):
well, several things. There were good things and bad
things. For some of the goodthings, for example, they it has
been shown that people could besometimes more effective if they
were working from home and theywere undergoing less stress. For
example, pregnant women had lessmiscarriages during COVID
Because they could work fromhome, which kind of shows that,
you know, sometimes people arereally overworking themselves,

(31:49):
and being able to maybe manageyour time more flexibly, can
help with that. Something thatwas not as good is that they
also showed that it wasimportant for children to have
social interactions for theirdevelopment. And then some of
the generations that startedtheir school life during COVID,
then had some adjustment issues,because it was really difficult
then to come back to, like, reallife socialization after having

(32:10):
everything virtually, yeah. Andalso, you know, there were lots
of things about social isolationand then how to overcome that,
and I think, with COVID, and,like, the booming industry of
online connection opportunities,right, like social media, but
also several platforms toconnect to others, and online
games you can play with peopleremotely and things like that.

(32:30):
You know, first we realized thatpeople were so social beings and
needed socialization. But thenalso, now we have more solutions
to that, and I think that willalso benefit some layers of the
populations of the populationthat are more vulnerable, for
example, mental health patientswho sometimes have a hard time
socializing in environmentswhere most people would

(32:50):
socialize because they are verysubconscious or they feel
stigmatized, and now they havealso more options thanks to the
developments that happenedduring COVID.

Brian (32:58):
Jason, do you remember we used to we switched our monthly
family gamings to online gaming.During lockdown, we were playing
Jack box games and did someonline role playing games. We
opened a Minecraft server forthe kids play on so that they
could get to like, you know, bekids.

Jason (33:13):
I definitely agree with the kids in the socialization,
because that happened with allof my kids. Like my oldest
daughter, was a freshman in highschool, and her freshman year
was all online, and I mean, thatjust had downstream impacts for
years, my youngest was in pre-K,and trying to do trying to sit a
four or five year old down infront of a computer to do
virtual school did not work.

Yann (33:32):
15 minute tops. You know, my daughter was the same,

Jason (33:36):
yeah. But on the other hand, at least, like it's young
enough, it doesn't matter atthat point, it's like, you can
just skip a year. Okay, sogetting point where we need to
wrap up, but there's one lastthing I want to get to which,
okay, I'm actually gonna sneakin two things. One is that the
news always seems to be talkingabout new potential things
floating around. I've heardabout bird flu for I don't know
how long, monkey pox, cow flunow going around like, how many

(33:57):
of these do we actually need tobe worried about? And how many
of them are just the news mediatrying to dig up something and
then related to that kind oftying it back to the game. Would
it be possible to have more thanone pandemic going on at the
same time?

Yann (34:09):
You got a lot of good questions in here. So, I mean,
I'm just gonna take the exampleof the H5N1 virus. So this
related to the flu virus. It's adifferent types of flu virus,
right? They there was lots ofarticles and newspapers. I don't
know if you saw them. Oh, it'sin the cows and they Oh, it's in
sea animals, as well as seamammals and everything. We're
finding it everywhere around theworld. So it was spreading, but

(34:31):
was it actually jumping tohumans? I think they had a
handful of cases of farmworkers. Maybe that had been
affected. They're often thefirst people to be affected
because they live, they workclosely to animals. Doesn't seem
to have really made thetransition, but it could. It's
good to keep an eye on. And Ithink we're seeing a lot more
because of COVID 19. We're moreaware of it. There's wastewater
surveillance program. People aremore on the lookout, right? M

(34:51):
pox is the same thing, right?It's been there before. It's not
the first time this come. Andthere's two different groups of
M pox, one more serious, thesecond one, the second place. Is
more widespread, but not asserious. So it's all about
whether these diseases are goingto make a transition to humans,
and how likely it is to do that.It's very hard to predict that.
This is why surveillance isimportant, to be able to pick it
up early, but at the same time,you know, it can cause a lot of

(35:13):
worry, but when it's notnecessarily warranted, right?
The chances that actually goingto jump is probably not that
high for for most disease.

Anna (35:19):
Yeah, I think the worry needs to be constructive in the
way that these diseases areaddressed early. So the few
cases that emerge are reallyaddressed early. We help also
from some countries to othercountries where they are first
detected, then we are reallyjust, you know, decreasing the
likelihood that this will be thenext pandemic. But so they, you
know, the worry needs to bethere to some level so that

(35:40):
governments still take thesediseases seriously. Because we
cannot just say that, Oh, okay,you know, the last five ones
didn't transition to humans inany significant way. So now we
are good any one of them canpotentially do that, and the
more cases there are, the higherthe likelihood that they will
eventually do it.

Yann (35:57):
And sometimes it's silent, like, for example, AIDS is a
great example, because Iremember, I was really upset
that they were blaming this oneguy from, where I'm from, from
Quebec, and he was a flightattendant, right? It was called
Patient Zero. If you ever seethe movie The Band Played On
that's, that's a great depictionof the early history of AIDS.
They were blaming it as havingbrought the disease to the
entirety of North America,right? A lot of weight to carry

(36:19):
for one person's 1000s of peopledead and sick, right? But
actually they found that lateron, the disease had been in
North America for at least 10years before that circulating
around, you know, silently inthe population, before we picked
it up. So we have to, also haveto be careful about this.
Sometimes the disease starts.COVID two was same, right? It
had come from China on day one.I mean, people were flying for
Wuhan trade to the UnitedStates. It had been there a long

(36:40):
time closing the border wasfutile at that point, because
the virus had already been therefor weeks. So sometimes it goes
on undetected for a while,right? And silently spread. So
that's another issue with thesetypes of diseases.

Anna (36:51):
and I think that brings me to a more social point as well,
that it's not like with thesepandemics or infectious
diseases. It's not really worthit to point the finger to other
nations or other groups ofpeople, because it can be almost
anybody, anywhere. And we sawthat with COVID where, you know,
in the US, some people werechanging side of the side of the
road, where they were likeencountering someone who looked

(37:13):
Asian. And then here inSingapore, actually, some of the
Asian mothers were taking theirkids away from Caucasian looking
kids because the Caucasians werenot wearing masks that early
and were not were like at higherrisk of infecting their kids.
So, you know, there were, thereare all these misconceptions as
well. And I think for futurepandemics, it will be really
important to look at the factsand address the disease without

(37:36):
pointing fingers.

Yann (37:37):
Yeah the funny thing that happened to me, related to this
is when we moved in Singapore,basically when the pandemic was
starting, like, January 2020,and I went to the doctor because
we had a really bad case of flu,and the family weren't
recovering well. And my wifetells the doctor, she's like,
could this be this COVID, thisnew virus. He's like, Oh, you're
not Asian. You don't have COVID.And I'm like,

Brian (37:54):
oh, gosh,

Yann (37:55):
how would you how would you ever know if you only test
Asian people?

Brian (37:59):
the doctors? said this?

Yann (38:00):
Yes, literally.

Brian (38:04):
Confirmation bias, institutionalized confirmation
bias,

Yann (38:07):
absolutely, yeah,

Jason (38:08):
because I think this is yet another place where the game
makes some simplifications. Sogoing back, like, what about the
part of the game where we've gotfour different diseases
spreading all well, not allaround the world. They're each
kind of geographically isolated.But could we have multiple
pandemics going on, multipleglobal pandemics all happening
at the same time. Or would thecountermeasures against one just
shut down all the other ones?

Anna (38:29):
Well I think there are several points here. First,
that, can an individual haveseveral infectious diseases?
Yes, of course they can. Theyand also, if you know your
immune system is alreadyfighting one, actually, you are
at a higher risk of also gettinganother one. And the immune
system maybe cannot be on somany fronts same time. So that's
one point. But then also, likefor diseases that are
transmitted in the same way,like, for example, airborne

(38:50):
diseases, like during the COVIDpandemic, I think there are
incidents decreased, like

Yann (38:54):
oh 100%

Anna (38:55):
because the Yeah, because of the protection measures that
were in place for COVID, andthen those measures actually
also work for these otherdiseases, like regular flu or
some of these others that weusually get. But then it
doesn't, you know, it would,those measures would not
necessarily work for a diseasethat would be transmitted in a
very different way, like if, forexample, there would have been
one that was transmitted bymosquitoes that would have

(39:17):
caused the global pandemic, thatwould have been completely
separate from the airborne one?

Yann (39:21):
Yeah I mean, this is what I was talking about earlier. It
comes back to transmissionmodes, right? The mosquito borne
diseases. I mean, I don't knowif you knew that, but malaria
used to be over Europe and theUnited States, and it's only
when we drained the swamps forfarming that it went away. So
it's based on the environmentand how where the mosquito can
breed water borne disease. Ifyou build a plant to clean up
the water, you're going toeliminate almost all of them all

(39:41):
at once, but if you don't haveit, I can tell you, I work in
some villages in Bangladesh, andwe look at the infectious
disease, gastrointestinalillnesses. Some people are
carrying three or four at thesame time, but if you provide
them with clean water, thatwould all go away, right? So
hitting every single differentmode of transmission at the same
time is hard, but if you hitone, you're going to hit all the
diseases that transmit that way.But you can definitely have
multiple pandemics at once. Weactually have multiple dynamics

(40:04):
you want on the world. At one,we had a SARSCoV2 pandemic going
on at the same time as a Cholerapandemic. And, you know, other
not quite pandemic, but likeDengue spreading more and things
like this. There's a lot goingon at one, it's absolutely
possible.

Anna (40:15):
I think that's also reflected in the game to make
sense, because one city can havehuge from different colors,
right?

Jason (40:20):
Yeah, you have to have the right play of outbreaks
happening. But yeah, it canhappen.

Brian (40:23):
Things have probably gone pretty bad for you, if that's
happening, though,

Yann (40:27):
yes, well, if you read these books, yeah, yeah.
Historically, like in Europe,for example, when they had the
plague, they didn't have justthe plague. They had the
smallpox going on at once. Theyhad the malaria, they had
everything going on at once.

Jason (40:37):
all right, so we need to wrap this up, and the way we
finish this up is because we'reuniversity professors. We like
giving grades to things, so welike to give the game a grade in
terms of the gameplay and interms of the science. So Brian,
I'll kick this to you first. Imean, I've already made my
opinion pretty much known interms of where this ranks in my
gameplay. What do you thinkabout the gameplay?

Brian (40:54):
Oh, gameplay is a clear A, I enjoy pandemic a lot. I
like playing cooperative gameswith Jason, in particular
because it means I'm not playingagainst him, which means it's
more likely I'm going to win thegame. It's fun to work as a team
on these I've noticed there'sbeen sort of a dearth of good
co-op games lately, butpandemic's always there, and
Pandemic always fun to play. Sogameplay, it's an A

Jason (41:14):
Anna, Jan, what's your opinion? And you can abstain if
you want.

Anna (41:17):
No I think I would like easily give it an A+

Yann (41:19):
Yeah, for playing for sure.

Anna (41:20):
Yeah for gameplay.

Jason (41:21):
Same here one of my top games, if not the top game, and
holding steady in the top 200 ofBoard Game Geek so a lot of
people agree. So solid gameplay.Now, what about the science?
Brian and I have hadconversations about what
constitutes a hard science game,and I think it's fair to say
that pandemic does not exist toteach us science. No, it's using
it to sort of wrap the mechanicsof the game in but not teach it.

(41:42):
But I'm going to throw this toAnna and Jan. Where do you think
pandemic breaks in terms of thescience content or what people
might be able to learn fromthis?

Brian (41:49):
We do kind of use great inflation scales too. Here. We
usually set things at a B as ourstarting point, and we go from
there. Yeah,

Anna (41:56):
I think I would give it to B. I was going to say B-, but
then you said, do things aboutthe inflation scale. So now I
don't really, let's, let's say aB to B+, because there are
definitely elements there. Ithink that you know, that can
make people think aboutpandemics and disease
transmission, and that's alreadysuch a good start. But then the
way that these pandemics andtransmissions are solved, that's

(42:20):
not very realistic.

Yann (42:20):
Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. It gives an inflated role,
a sense of importance of theindividual when it's really
coming to I think that'sprobably the biggest thing it
makes, right? And also, how easythis react a disease probably
exaggerates that a bit. Andyou're not going to learn about
diseases because they're colors,right? So,

Brian (42:38):
yeah, I think, I think I'm gonna give it a B -. And I
do love pandemic. But I thinkeven when you look at the fact
that you can take that basicpandemic engine, that idea of
sort of panicking to keep aheadof a disaster, and that's really
what you can apply to a lot ofdifferent scenarios, to the
dykes in Netherlands, toCthulhu, it's just it's got a
thin veneer of science over whatis a really fun engine. It's not

(43:00):
really a science game. There'ssome things about this that,
like the connectivity of thecities. It might be a little bit
too far down the simplificationscale to get, like, a solid
science grade.

Jason (43:10):
OK, so basically, very fun game, maybe not the best to
try to teach people's science Iwill say, I'll give it a B plus,
for many of the reasons Ialready said, like, it's not
meant to be a science game. Soit's not surprising. We don't
get a lot. But I like how oneperson described this, and I
heard this years ago, is thatbasically pandemic, you're
playing the role of a bunch ofpublic servants who are working
together to save the world. Andif there's any message I want,

(43:31):
like, teach my kids about like,Hey, these are who the real
heroes are. That's the one Iwant it to be. These are not
like, superheroes going beataround bad guys. These are some
guy in a lab trying to help savepeople's lives, or a doctor
going out and treating people,or someone who's just like
managing the phones and saying,hey, you need to go over here,
and you need to go over thatway. I agree. Yann, it
emphasizes the role of theindividual more, but ultimately,

(43:51):
communities are made up of abunch of individuals, and a lot
of the real heroes are thesenameless, faceless people behind
the scenes that are making thisstuff work.

Brian (43:59):
I guess it also emphasizes cooperation.

Anna (44:02):
One point to consider also is that this has been made in
like 15 years ago, and I thinkscience games boom after
pandemic. We are getting moreand more realistic science games
that also gamification hasbecome a thing now that was not
necessarily something peoplewere really looking into 15
years ago. So I think we alsohave to keep that in mind when
evaluating pandemic and fittingit against some of the more

(44:25):
modern games.

Yann (44:25):
Yeah, because now, after the pandemic, everybody knows a
lot more than before thepandemic about infectious
diseases. It makes my job easieras a teacher, for sure.

Jason (44:33):
Yeah, and this may be a preview for some future season,
but I know you two have actuallymade a game called Lockdown,
which I assume has a lot more ofthe stuff we talked about in
terms of actual pandemicresponse in it.

Yann (44:44):
Very scientifically accurate.

Anna (44:45):
Oh yeah, I was going to say that we're great at
criticizing other games when itcomes to ours. It was also, you
know, it was not the mostaccurate game. It was also meant
for a much younger, or like,more inclusive population. The
way that already seven yearsold, could play our game. And
the whole goal was to bringfamilies or group of friends

(45:06):
together during the pandemic, sothat they can say something, you
know, even like lockdowns orother periods.

Yann (45:11):
Yeah, I think the best game work on multiple levels,
right? So you've got an easybaseline where you play, and
then some people can get moreinformation from it, and you can
put so these, the best ones,will have multiple levels. I
think,

Anna (45:21):
yeah, but I think that, you know, our game lockdown, it
was still designed with like, aneducational component in mind,
and that component can beadapted to different groups of
people, so you will use itdifferently when seven years old
than with university studentslike Yann uses our game in his
class and also something thatcan just generate some material
for the lecture that he's givingthe game as an icebreaker,

Yann (45:42):
and even just generating curiosity, right? Like I'm sure
pandemic generates curiosityabout it. People gonna go look
it up on the internet, right,and try to find more information
that is very useful.

Jason (45:51):
One more thing along these lines, which actually has
nothing to do with the nature ofthe gameplay or the science, but
researching for this episode, Ifound out that apparently, Matt
Leacock, who designed the game,5% of his royalties from this
game, he donates to DoctorsWithout Borders, which, I mean,
how more appropriate Can yougive than that? Because for
those who don't know, DoctorsWithout Borders is an NGO, non

(46:11):
governmental organization,nonprofit, who are their job is
they send doctors around theworld to treat diseases all
these outbreaks. And I'm surethey were involved in that
Haitian cholera outbreak, andI'm sure they were involved in
COVID all over the place.

Anna (46:23):
Yeah. Now you made me wonder, Where are the you know,
where is our Arkahm Hororr'sdevelopers, money like, where do
they give

Jason (46:32):
sanitariums and mental health?

Anna (46:35):
Hopefully, I would like to think that.

Jason (46:39):
All right, well, we gotta wrap it up there. So Anna Yann,
thank you very much. Are thereany socials, or any places where
you want people to look you up

Brian (46:46):
or find lockdown?

Anna (46:47):
Yeah, I guess if you can find lockdown, that would be
good. And then you can find usthrough lockdown.
So you have to, you have togoogle lockdown an educational
card game, and we don't. We'renot on Amazon yet. We're only in
Singapore on shopee, but youcan, if you find the game, it
can be shipped to the US.
So maybe I can share the link toour distributors website, and
you can order it actually fromanywhere in the world, from the
distributor's website.

Jason (47:07):
Yeah I'll put the link in the show notes.

Yann (47:09):
Okay, that's great. All our profits go to charity as
well. 100% we're doing evenbetter than pandemic.

Anna (47:16):
Yeah, it's going to a mental health related charity
called the red pencil that'sdoing art therapy with people,
all kinds of people from thegeneral population. And they did
a great job during the pandemic,and adapted a lot of their
workshops to like online where,you know, there were things like
painting with coffee and otherforms of expressions that
probably helped lots of peopleto get out some of the negative

(47:37):
emotions they may have dealingin COVID.

Brian (47:39):
Oh that's that's so heartwarming for talking about a
game about horrible pandemics.All right. Anna, Yann, Thanks
for joining us. Thanks fortalking to us about pandemic.
Thanks for talking to us aboutlockdown and the science behind
it. We're gonna wrap it up here.So everybody have a good month,
good games and good fun,

Jason (47:55):
and have fun playing dice with the universe.

Brian (47:57):
See ya

Jason (48:00):
this has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright
2024 listeners are free to reusethis recording for any non
commercial purpose, as long ascredit is given to gaming with
science. This podcast isproduced with a support from the
University of Georgia. Allopinions are those of the hosts,
and do not imply endorsement bythe sponsors. If you wish to
purchase any of the games wetalked about, we encourage you
to do so through your friendlylocal game store. Thank you and

(48:21):
have fun playing dice with theuniverse. You.

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S1E10 - Pandemic (Epidemiology)

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