Diane Gromala runs the Transforming Pain project at SFU’s school of interactive arts and technology.

It’s still unknown whether games about things like homelessness can change attitudes, but creators believe that fun leads to knowledge

After you infect the first farmer, who passes you on to the rest of the farm’s inhabitants, you spread quickly. Everyone—students, medical staff, labourers, office workers—is a target. A truck driver transports you to a warehouse in another town. Tourists take you back to their cities.

At first, it appears as though you’ll rampage on, unstoppable. But over the next 30 days or so, you make people sick and they recover, now immune to you. The worst over, you fizzle out, no longer the danger you once were. As hard as you tried to infect an entire population, you couldn’t. You couldn’t even kill anyone.

Such is the role of a pandemic influenza virus, which you assume when playing Killer Flu. Killer Flu is a browser-based serious game—a video game “where the purpose behind its existence is to create some impact other than entertainment as a priority”. That definition comes from Ben Sawyer, cofounder and codirector of the Washington, D.C.–based Serious Games Initiative and its Games for Health project.

That’s not to say serious games can’t be entertaining. “What good entertainment arises from in video games often is well-designed interfaces, well-designed rules of play,” Sawyer told the Georgia Straight by phone from his office in Portland, Maine. While it’s gotten relatively little attention, the video-game medium has been used in learning, politics, business, and health.

Developed by Persuasive Games for the U.K. Clinical Virology Network, Killer Flu was designed to depict the way that seasonal and pandemic flus mutate and spread. Ian Bogost, a founding parter of Persuasive, is also an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. In a phone interview with the Straight, he said the objective was, in part, “to inject a greater amount of accuracy into the depiction of the spread of a mutated virus”.

Babak Pourbohloul is reluctant to equate Killer Flu’s portrayal of the flu virus with the real thing, but he does see potential in using a video game as a public health tool. “I would like to remain cautious about the direct comparison between computer games and real-life experiences,” he told the Straight by phone from his office in Vancouver.

Pourbohloul is the director of mathematical modelling for the B.C. Centre for Disease Control and the chair of the Canadian Consortium for Pandemic Preparedness Modeling. His job is to use math and computer simulations to come up with recommendations for health authorities on how to deal with things like H1N1.

While Pourbohloul wasn’t aware of Killer Flu, he said that “if these games could be based on realistic scenarios, that would be a fantastic educational tool.”

Pourbohloul’s work isn’t dramatically different from Persuasive’s game. Killer Flu uses data that epidemiologists employ in their modelling. One element that makes Killer Flu effective is that it has people play what would intuitively be the antagonist: the virus itself. The homily about walking a mile in another person’s shoes is relevant. “One of the things that games do is they allow us to explore different roles than we’re used to being in,” Bogost said, “and that gives us perspective.”

Some people get offended by the idea of treating a serious subject in the context of a video game. Serious-games consultant Terry Lavender got a few angry responses from the public after creating Homeless: It’s No Game. The browser-based game, developed in 2006 while he was a master’s student at Simon Fraser University, puts players in the role of a homeless woman struggling to survive in Vancouver. “It was like homelessness is too serious to be treated in a game,” Lavender told the Straight at a West End coffee shop.

It’s partly an issue of semantics. The words game and play have come to refer to frivolous pastimes. But Lavender said that just as a kitten learns to hunt by pouncing on balls of yarn, and puppies learn how to find their place in the social order by roughhousing with other puppies, humans do much of their learning with games.

To many, the term “serious games” might sound oxymoronic. Bogost considers games that are created to further the goals of an institution or organization—as opposed to a company trying to drive profits—part of this category. He believes the term was meant to be rhetorical and used when speaking to people who don’t understand video games.

That’s why Bogost prefers the term “persuasive games” to “serious games”. “For me, it’s more useful to think about the ways that games are persuading, or the ways that they are making arguments, rather than the context of their creation,” he said. Ghettoizing entertaining games and keeping the “good, healthy, educational games in the realm of seriousness” is impractical, according to Bogost, because that’s not the way things are in the real world. The fact is that serious games can be fun, and fun games can have serious themes.