Category Archives: Biology

October 22, 2014 · 9:29 pm

Pandemic II

Screenshot of Dan Archibald's game Pandemic 2 for Dark Realm Studios

Nice clean vector graphics in the main world map screen.

Pandemic II is a free to play browser game by Dan Archibald of Dark Realm Studios

What does it teach?

It is first and foremost a pure strategy game about global disease transmission. It wasn’t designed with any educational intentions, so any lessons learned about epidemiology and medical microbiology are just bonus spillovers.

What do you do?

You create a pathogen (bacteria, virus or parasite) that you try to spread from country to country to ultimately kill every human being on earth before the planet’s scientists can come up with a vaccine.

To accomplish your mission you are able to change your pathogens properties that affect the three principal parameters under your direct control:

  • Lethality
  • Infectivity
  • Visibility

For example choosing vomiting as a symptom will increase lethality slightly by dehydrating hosts; it will increase infectivity significantly by exposing others to pathogen-rich body fluids and, finally, it will also increase visibility a lot as vomiting is a very noticeable symptom. Fevers, on the other hand, have the advantage of being deadly while barely being noticeable.

Your best strategy depends on which country you start in, but you should always try to keep the lethality and visibility low in the beginning. Otherwise other countries will shut down their borders by closing airports and seaports. It is better to infect every country without causing any deaths or conspicuous symptoms and then equip your pathogen with lethal symptoms to kill off all infected people (this is, to put it mildly, hefty artistic license as all of the pathogens of the infected individuals could never evolve a new virulence factor at the same time).

You also have to take account of the geography, climate and the natural disasters occurring randomly in different countries. If, for example, there is a flood in an area that you are already infecting you should choose “waterborne” as your pathogen’s route of transmission. This will make it spread much quicker throughout that region. And if you want to spread the disease from Russia to the Middle East, you should make your pathogen resistant to heat and perhaps pick insects or rodents for vector-borne transmission.

Do you learn anything?

An average player will very likely increase his awareness of how diseases spread and gain a better understanding of what role transportation and virulence factors play in that process. He might also gain new appreciation for the ways society deals with epidemics: closing borders, airports and schools; exterminating rodents, imposing curfews and martial law; hurrying to develop vaccines that may or may not work, etc. The player might pick up same basic geography too!

Pandemic II is in fact a very good example of an educational simulation, which I wrote about in my review of Conflict: Immunity. Simulation games are uniquely able to make the workings of systems clear and comprehensible. Epidemiology is all about systems; it is all about lots of interconnecting objects and processes and thus in some respects better explained by a game than by a textbook or a lecture.

You will certainly kill more people and increase your score the better you understand the principles of epidemiology as they are modelled in the game. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you will gain greater understanding of real-life epidemiology as the simulation model is vastly simplified and perhaps even fundamentally wrong. True, textbook models might also be wrong, but the risk with games is the incentive to exploit the model: to search for weak spots in the algorithms in order to increase your score, rather than to focus on the sound foundations of the algorithms in order to increase your understanding.

Pros

Pandemic II is unusually ambitious for a free flash game from a small developer. The complex interplay between geography, communications and pathogen attributes makes for deep gameplay with lots of replay value and actual educational benefits.

Cons

If you don’t like strategy games or board games of the Risk variety, chances are it will bore you.

Additional information

Dan Archibald originally made the turn based Pandemic in 2007. It was quickly followed by Pandemic: Extinction of Man (2007) and then Pandemic II (2008), which was big hit in the flash game market and spawned the President Madagascar-meme. It was a major improvement on the first two games and served as a template for later infect-the-world games. The first one of those was Archibald’s own Pandemic 2.5 (2012). for iOS It was a relatively successful but eclipsed by the release of James Vaughan’s Plague Inc. for iOS and Android just three weeks later. While it was clearly a blatant clone of Archibald’s 2008 opus, it was also generally deemed more of an improvement than Archibald’s own 2012 effort and outsold it by a factor of two. More recently Vaughan has taken the genre even further with Plague Inc: Evolved (2014) for PC and Mac (Xbox One forthcoming) while cash-in clones like Infection Bio War (2014) has arrived on iOS and Android.

There have also been topical spin-offs like Archibald’s Pandemic: American Swine (2009): a role reversal where you fight the 2009 swine flu pandemic in the United States. Killer Flu (2009) by Ian Bogost and The Great Flu (2009) by Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam are two similar and institutionally sponsored browser based games.

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Filed under Biology, Epidemiology, High School, Medicine, Microbiology, Mid School

October 15, 2014 · 4:39 pm

Meta!Blast (in development)

Screenshot from the educational game Metablast developed by Eve Syrkin Wurtele and Iowa State University

Tardigrades strolling about on the last remaining plant in existence.

The Iowa State University developers of Meta!Blast may claim that the game “is a unique approach to an educational challenge” but it is actually cookie cutter similar to Immune Attack. You pilot a microscopic ship in an organic 3D environment, only this time it is a dying soybean plant rather than a defective immune system that needs to be patched up. And just like Immune Attack, scanning organisms, cells and organelles will produce an information box with text and pictures for your learning.

You begin exploring the surface of a leaf, then the leaf interior, a cell, a chloroplast, and the nucleus. Everything looks very appealing but like most games (not only educational ones) Meta!Blast’s environment are more akin to a film set than reality. Your journey feels like a guided tour through a virtual museum. There is little interaction between you and the environment, no interaction between objects in the environment, and no real freedom – for example, when you are instructed to bring water to a dehydrated tardigrade you must pick up the water in the specific spot the game points out for you even though there is water to be found all around on the leaf.

Still, taken as a purely visual 3D representation of a photosynthetic cell Dr. Eve Syrkin Wurtele and her huge team of students from departments of Art and Design, Biology, and Computer Science and Human Computer Interaction have done fine. Maybe they will in time also manage to breathe some life into the prop mitochondria and prop chloroplasts of the game, which has been in development since 2008.

The laughable claims that the game “encourages creative, non-linear thinking by engaging students in problem-solving via game play, role enactment.” is political speak not to be taken seriously by anyone with half a brain.

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Filed under Biology, Cell Biology, Fantastic Voyage, High School

October 3, 2014 · 4:10 am

Immune Attack

Immune Attack is a Fantastic Voyage styled game about the innate immune system.

Low flying over the macrophage, forcing it to emit the cytokine IL-8 (aka CXCL8)

Immune Attack is free downloadable game for Windows XP and later versions.

A number of very large institutions were involved with the game. It was funded chiefly by the National Science Foundation and developed over four years by the Federation of American Scientists, the University of South California, Brown University, and Escape Hatch Entertainment.

Garry M. Gaber (ex-LucasArts director of several Star Wars games) seems to have been the main creative force. It is also interesting to note that Jenova Chen of Journey fame is credited as one of the designers.

What does it teach?

You are introduced to various features of the innate immune system. The game is designed to appeal to mid school and high schools students but covers material that is normally taught in college.

What do you do?

Considering the Star Wars heritage, the game unsurprisingly joins the rank of biology games that borrows its concept from seminal sci-fi classic The Fantastic Voyage (1966). You pilot a miniature ship (a nanobot) through a 3D word of blood vessels and connective tissue on your mission to repair a defective immune system. You will mainly be teaching macrophages and neutrophils how to hunt and kill bacteria.

The mission is partitioned into discrete levels, for example:

  • Find the monocyte in the blood vessels (just follow the map while “flying” in tunnels of blood)
  • Make the monocyte transmigrate by activating cell adhesion molecules (“shoot” the selectins and an ICAM).
  • Make a trail of complement proteins to guide the macrophage to the site of infection (“shoot” the C3a molecules)

Do you learn anything?

The levels are introduced by tutorials in the form of scientists and military styled officers who hand out objectives, information and advice. This is really were most of the learning is taking place, but during the levels themselves there is also information represented in a more concrete manner: scanning the organs and cells with your reticle displays an information box with text and a picture. This is quite neat.

The gameplay is less congenial to learning. The mechanics are identical to any space flight game: move around in a 3D environment, find things and shoot them. You  don’t have to master the science to master the game, but you will certainly have to master the rather complicated controls and possess decent visuospatial skills to navigate the claustrophobic and confusing environments successfully. So the core of the game is as gamey as games get.

And yet there is not much depth to the game. Immune Attack is an exceptionally ambitious and big budget educational game, but it offers less of a simulation than a small amateur game like Conflict: Immunity. The levels are linear and straightforward. You don’t have to think; you don’t have to adapt to an evolving environment. You know what to do, but may not be quick and precise enough to do so. The challenge is physical, not cerebral.

Though the levels can be considered big minigames, they still offer a lot more than the game & watch-like simplicity of the minigames in Code Fred. Some are even quite engrossing – for a while. I initially enjoyed hunting bacteria in the connective tissue, which felt wonderfully organic and messy, but I rapidly got increasingly bored and frustrated as the task got out of hand and transformed into a Sisyphean game of Where’s Waldo. The more bacteria the macrophages engulfed, the harder it got to find the few remaining ones. At the same time they kept reproducing and put you back in square one. Thank god for the cheat code.

The game is in essence an interactive tutorial interspersed with spatial agility tests that you must pass before proceeding. The tests don’t have anything to do with understanding the (surprisingly advanced) biology but they might make some of the stuff more tangible and concrete. Flying around, trying to locate and shoot the selectins, and then watching the trailing monocyte attach and slow down, does hammer the process of transmigration into your head. It is, however, not a time efficient way of learning. I think it could work as a complement to textbooks and the developers indeed state that the game is “a supplemental teaching tool”.

Pros

Crammed full of facts and credible science in carefully crafted 3D-environments that evoke a sense of wonder.

Cons

Clichéd gameplay with superficial relevance to the scientific concepts.

Additional information

Clueless comments on Immune Attack and educational games in general in this article from the prestigious scientific journal Cell.

 

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Filed under Biology, College, Fantastic Voyage, FAS, High School, Immunology, Mid School

September 22, 2014 · 10:14 pm

Conflict: Immunity

Conflict Immunity is a game that demonstrates a simplified model of how B cells, T cells and macrophages work together in humoral immunity and cell mediated immunity.

Not a pretty sight, but there are some decent ideas here.

Conflict: Immunity is a free to play browser game by Brett Baughman, a biology teacher who makes games and quizzes for his website BioMan Biology.

What does it teach?

It demonstrates a simplified model of how B cells, T cells and macrophages work together in humoral immunity and cell mediated immunity.

What do you do?

You are patrolling a single screen in top down 2D with ten nonspecific cells which you have to protect from invading pathogens. At your disposal are five different types of leukocytes (white blood cells):

  1. Macrophages
  2. Helper T cells
  3. B cells (Naïve B cells)
  4. Activated B cells (Plasma cells)
  5. Killer T cells (Cytotoxic T cells)

When the game starts you are given a short tutorial on the functions of each member of your leukocyte army. You then get to play the levels where you fight infections of increasing complexities. Between each level you have to answer multiple choice questions that review the material you learned in the tutorial (and which hopefully was reinforced during play). For example: “What is an antigen?” (Correct answer: “A surface molecule on a pathogen that allows the immune system to recognize the pathogen.”).

There are also some bonus levels where you just go wild, shooting antibodies on a screen swarming with pathogens. These are the low points of the game and add neither educational value nor entertainment value, just padding.

A typical core loop of play in the levels proper looks like this:

  1. Choose the macrophage, move it quickly to catch and eat a pathogen.
  2. Select the helper T cell and move it to the macrophage so that it can present its antigen to the helper T cell. Do this before another pathogen invades one of your nonspecific cells.
  3. Select the B cell and move it to the helper T cell. The B cell will be transformed into a Plasma Cell that can shoot antibodies.
  4. Select the plasma cell. Hunt for new pathogens and shoot antibodies at them.
  5. Select the macrophage and move in to eat the pathogens that are tagged with antibodies.

If any of your nonspecific cells have been invaded the first two steps are exactly the same but the concluding steps won’t involve B cells:

  1. Select a killer T cell. Move it to the helper T cell. This will activate the killer T cell.
  2. Move the killer T cell to one of your infected nonspecific cell. Shoot perforin and cytotoxins at the cell and it will eventually burst, killing the cell as well as the pathogen. If you’re not fast enough the pathogen will kill the cell and move on to one of the remaining cells.

This might be the abridged version (with some artistic license to boot) of the adaptive immune system, but it is still complicated enough to be pretty confusing. It will almost certainly take a while for most people to get the hang of it. Sure, in the first level you can do with just plasma cells and in the second level you only have to use killer T cells, but in later levels you have to use both and this is the hard and strategic part: to decide your priorities and get your leukocytes to work in concert against the invaders.

It is almost always a good idea to first use plasma cells as the antibody-tagged pathogens are unable to invade your cells. When just one cell is invaded the game has a way of quickly descending into chaos. On the other hand, this is where the game gets interesting, as you have to improvise your strategies as the environment changes.

Sometimes you are attacked by viruses and bacteria simultaneously and in later levels you also have antibiotics at your disposal. They don’t affect resistant bacteria, however, and this is meant to teach you about the dangers of antibiotics overuse. It’s an idea that could make for an interesting game mechanic if developed further, but in truth it doesn’t make a noticeable difference to the game play when it appears all too briefly.

Conflict immunity quizz

You always have to answer two questions in between the levels.

The game plays much like a regular, if crude, top down shooter. Unfortunately there are some control issues: you maneuver your chosen leukocyte with one hand on the arrow keys and the other hand on the spacebar, but when you wish to select another leukocyte you have to move one hand and grab the mouse. This is really cumbersome in the heat of battle when you have to think on your feet and move quickly. Arguably, this further stresses the need to learn the different functions of the leukocytes by heart, but it could have been solved with a smarter design. It is especially annoying in the final levels when HIV appears, multiplies, and kills every leukocyte it touches while you frantically try to switch between them. A pity as that, too, is an idea with potential. If handled with just a little more care and taken a little bit further it would have made for much richer game play.

Do you learn anything?

Simulations, games that model systems with interconnecting objects and processes, are in my opinion probably the only kind of educational games where the game mechanics themselves truly have the potential to support better understanding than traditional teaching. But simulations are by no means suited for all kind of subjects. Typically they aren’t very efficient either. If you need to learn something specific in a short time, a simulation will rarely be the go-to solution. A small, focused game where the mechanics support learning  by simply providing feedback and motivation, will always be a better choice if you just need to learn for example the Greek alphabet or the 20 amino acids.

Simulations can make for deep and fun game play, however, and the immune system is the kind of intricate system that just begs to be simulated. It is also a natural fit for many traditional gaming genres thanks to the war metaphors that are so easy to apply to the subject.

Though small, very rough and amateurish, Conflict: Immunity manages to give you some feel for the immune system by providing a tiny toy simulation as well as traditional action gameplay. I consider that a success by the standards of educational games with 100 times the budget.

There is certainly room for enormous improvements in presentation and interface design but my main reservations concern the role of macrophages. You almost always finish a level by eating the last pathogen with a macrophage (step 5 in the core loop). But to be able to do that you must first use the macrophage as an antigen presenting cells by eating a pathogen and presenting its antigen to a helper T cell (step 1 and 2 in the core loop). If you don’t have any prior knowledge of the immune system this ought to strike you as strange and unnecessary. Why go through all these steps? Why not just use the macrophage alone to gobble up all the pathogens? They disappear from the screen all the same! The downside is that new ones keep appearing if you play this way. Only the antibody-tagged pathogens count when you try to rack up the required tally that the level demands, but you’re never told why. It seems arbitrary – illogical. The rules of the simulations simply fail to communicate the use of antibodies.

Pros

The basic premise of the game is sound and it is actually quite fun for a short while. It is oddly satisfying to shoot and eat the pathogens and there is a good chance that you will learn at least something. With some more work on the game design and the interface this could have been brilliant.

Cons

Difficult controls, lack of polish, minor bugs, inconsistencies and a misleading stats display are the main offenders. Better graphics and properly looping music would have been nice, of course, but not essential.

Additional information

An interview with the developer.

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Filed under Biology, biomanbio, High School, Immunology, Mid School

September 20, 2014 · 2:48 am

Code Fred: Survival Mode

code fred
Code Fred: Survival Mode is a free to play browser game developed by Helpful Strangers and Unit9 for Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

What does it teach?

It provides a brief but wide-ranging introduction to human physiology.

What do you do?

You play 12 mini games that intersperse the narrative frame of a boy being hunted by a wolf through a forest. Each mini game illustrates a body process that aids survival, either via avoiding danger or via recovery from trauma or disease. The mini games deals with:

  1. Adrenaline
  2. Hemoglobin
  3. Heart rate
  4. Vasoconstriction
  5. Blood clots
  6. Nerve regeneration
  7. Bacteria & cilia
  8. Phagocytes
  9. Lymphocytes & antibodies
  10. Metabolism
  11. Digestion
  12. Blood sugar regulation

The games are very simplistic: schematic animations of a body process where you just have to click on the correct molecule/cell/organ at the right time, sometimes as quickly as possible. Still, they are not always very intuitive. Trial-and-error is occasionally required and might prove frustrating.

Do you learn anything?

If you know next to nothing about physiology you will certainly pick up a thing or two from a play through. I’m not sure it will stick though. Almost certainly, you would learn much more by browsing through an illustrated children’s book. I’d actually go as far as saying that the interactivity subtracts, rather than adds to the learning process. Whatever educational value the animations offer is probably lost due to the need to focus on the game mechanics. The animations would be easier to absorb and reflect on if you could just sit back, relax and watch.

The main reason for this is the lack of connection between the mechanics and the physiological processes they are applied to. Nor is there any connection between the mechanics and any process of learning. Consequently the mini games serve to irritate rather than to illuminate or even motivate. To succeed you don’t have to understand anything about the physiology and you most definitely won’t perform better by learning and understanding more. You’ll perform better with nimbler mousing and vision, that’s all.

kentucky route zero, another world, code fred

Three very different games, one look.

Pros

Great presentation! The Kentucky Route Zero/Another World-like visuals are complemented perfectly by MindFunk Productions’ “organic, cinematic cowboy theme”. The desire to see more of the art and get back into the two bar guitar groove was actually what kept me playing to the end. I wasn’t motivated by a desire to learn more, neither was I coerced to learn more by a desire to play more. On the contrary, I thought the playing torturous and only endured it thanks to the art and the music.

Cons

This might have been acceptable if the minigames were educational, but they aren’t. They are just clickable animations that are made harder to watch … which you must do again and again until you’ve mastered an arbitrary and dull task.

Additional information

A short interview with one of the designers.
A long post mortem explaining the thought process behind the mechanics. Read it + play the game = cognitive dissonance.

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Filed under Biology, High School, Mid School, Physiology

September 16, 2014 · 8:00 pm

Crazy Plant Shop

Crazy Plant Shop by Filament Games

What does it teach?

Crazy Plant Shop is a browser-based game where you learn about inheritance and how dominant and recessive genes work.

What do you do?

You are running a plant shop where you buy, sell and breed different types of plants. An assortment of customers visits your store with specific requests for plants. To satisfy them, you order plants from a catalog and then breed the plants to create offspring with the desired traits. Every order you fulfill earns you money that you will need to spend in the plant catalog to further increase your breeding stock.

In essence, the game is shop sim with a Punnett squares game mechanic which teaches you the basics of gene expression.

Do you learn anything?

The game is really just a shop sim with a thin educational coating. You will spend most of your time and brain power on boring administrative duties like inventory management and time management. This is not only boring, it is also a very inefficient way of learning.

While logistics as a game mechanic does not seem congenial to the subject of genetics, there actually is some synergy as you have to think in terms of genes, rather than the observable qualities of your plants, in order to offer your customers the most combinations of plants using the least amount of breeding stock (store space) and breeding attempts (energy). This is commendable and a pretty rare thing in educational games.

You don’t really improve your score the more you learn about genetics though. To do well in the game you only need to understand the very basic principles of breeding. The key to do better is then just a case of honing your logistics, not honing your knowledge or your understanding of the breeding process. This is really a game about store management not a game about science.

Pros

The production values are very impressive. The art style is pleasant and there is sort of a story to experience through interaction with the numerous characters that visit your store. Depending on your disposition (and age) it might motivate you or distract you from playing the game.

Cons

The point of educational games is surely to make learning fun, not make it (even more) boring by mixing it with ultra-boring administrative work. The game is also pretty confusing and hard to learn even though the genetics involved are very basic. If you go into the game without already grasping the concept of a Punnett Square, you will likely not get very far.

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Filed under Biology, Filament Games, Genetics, Mid School