Zombiepox (also ZOMBIEPOX) is a cooperative board game in which players fight the spread of zombies that threaten to take over the town. It was developed by Tiltfactor Laboratory, a game research center located at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, focusing on games and play that investigate and explain ideas.
Zombiepox is an evolution of Pox: Save the People , which was developed by Tiltfactor in coordination with the Mascoma Valley Health Initiative to stop the spread of misinformation concerning the effects of vaccination. [1] [2] Zombiepox is also designed to be educational and initial research showed that people's sentiments on vaccinations became more positive when faced with the fictitious disease in the game. [3] Playing the game also appears to improve people's systems thinking abilities. [4]
Designed as a board game for one to four players, the game centers on a town that has been infected with a disease called zombiepox. The objective is to stop the spread and help humans escape by vaccinating them. Players win the game if the disease can no longer spread and lose if too many people become full-blown zombies. [5]
The game won a Major Fun Award for Cooperation Thinking in 2012. [6] It was also selected for display at IndieCade's 2012 Indie Game Showcase. [7]
Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and the co-founder and CEO of Gamelab, a computer game development company based in Manhattan. GameLab is known for the game Diner Dash. Each year Zimmerman hosts the Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference. He is also the co-author of four books including Rules of Play with Katie Salen, which was published in November 2004. Eric Zimmerman has written at least 24 essays and whitepapers since 1996, mostly pertaining to game development from an academic standpoint. He's currently a founding faculty at the NYU Game Center.
The Corrupted Blood incident was a virtual pandemic in the MMORPG World of Warcraft, which began on September 13, 2005, and lasted for one month. The epidemic began with the introduction of the new raid Zul'Gurub and its end boss Hakkar the Soulflayer. When confronted and attacked, Hakkar would cast a hit point-draining and highly contagious debuff spell called "Corrupted Blood" on players.
Antichamber is a first-person puzzle-platform game created by Australian developer Alexander "Demruth" Bruce. Many of the puzzles are based on phenomena that occur within impossible objects created by the game engine, such as passages that lead the player to different locations depending on which way they face, and structures that seem otherwise impossible within normal three-dimensional space. The game includes elements of psychological exploration through brief messages of advice to help the player figure out solutions to the puzzles as well as adages for real life. The game was released on Steam for Microsoft Windows on 31 January 2013. A version originally sold with the Humble Indie Bundle 11 in February 2014 added support for Linux and OS X.
Zombie apocalypse is a genre of fiction in which civilization collapses due to overwhelming swarms of zombies. Typically only a few individuals or small bands of survivors are left living.
Lindsay Grace is a video game designer, artist, professor, and writer who currently lives in Miami, FL. He is best known as an academic game designer who employs critical design. He is the 2019 Games for Change Vanguard Award winner and Knight Chair at the University of Miami. He served as founding director of the American University Game Lab and Studio (JOLT), which includes the Fake News game, Factitious, the NPR game Commuter Challenge and Miami Herald's Gaming the System. In 2013 his game, Wait was inducted in the Games for Change Hall of Fame as one of the five most significant games for change in the last decade. Created in 2009, players must navigate a 3D world that fades away when the player moves, and grows more detailed as they wait. If players fail to move for long, the world also recedes. Other notable games include Big Huggin', a game controlled by a giant stuffed animal that players must hug to meet game goals. Big Huggin' was Kickstarted with notable support from Jane McGonigal and selected for the ACM SIGGRAPH's Aesthetics of Gameplay Show.
Humans vs. Zombies is a live-action game predominantly played at US college campuses. The storyline of the game dictates that players begin as Humans and try to survive a Zombie invasion. The ultimate goal of the game is for either all Humans to be turned into Zombies, or for the humans to survive a set amount of time. Humans can defend themselves using any item that is approved by a moderator and thereby deemed safe and appropriate. The most common equipment includes balled up socks, marshmallows, and foam dart blasters. Humans may throw or launch these items at Zombies, who become stunned once hit. Safe zones are also established so that players can eat and sleep in safety. Zombies, on the other hand, are unarmed and must tag Humans to gain a kill. In some cases, if a kill is not made within a set time period, Zombies "starve" and are removed from the field of play.
Pandemic is a cooperative board game designed by Matt Leacock and first published by Z-Man Games in the United States in 2008. Pandemic is based on the premise that four diseases have broken out in the world, each threatening to wipe out a region. The game accommodates two to four players, each playing one of seven possible roles: dispatcher, medic, scientist, researcher, operations expert, contingency planner, or quarantine specialist. Through the combined effort of all the players, the goal is to discover all four cures before any of several game-losing conditions are reached.
The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom is a puzzle-platform game for Xbox Live Arcade and Windows PC developed by The Odd Gentlemen. Reviews of the game praised its unique puzzle mechanics, comparing them to the likes of Portal and Braid. It was released for the Xbox 360 on February 17, 2010. It was originally a student's graduate thesis at the University of Southern California. It was published by 2K Play. The PC version was released exclusively via Steam on April 20, 2010.
IndieCade is an international juried festival of independent games. IndieCade is known as "the video game industry's Sundance." At IndieCade, independent video game developers are selected to screen and promote their work at the annual IndieCade festival and showcase events. In 2009, IndieCade launched a conference track featuring classes, panels, workshops, and keynotes. The conference has since become a major attraction for indie developers and others in the industry.
The Tiltfactor Laboratory is a serious game research center located at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Its work is centered on critical play an approach that uses games and play to investigate and explain ideas. Outcomes from the lab's work range from scholarly papers and conference presentations to video games, urban games, board games, and performances. Tiltfactor's motto is "Game Design for Social Change."
Robin Hunicke is an American video game designer and producer. She is a professor of game design at UC Santa Cruz and the co-founder of Funomena.
Project Zomboid is an open world isometric survival horror video game in development by British and Canadian independent developer The Indie Stone. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested world where the player is challenged to survive for as long as possible before inevitably dying. It was one of the first five games released on the alpha funding section of the gaming portal Desura.
Atom Zombie Smasher is a real-time strategy game developed by independent developer Blendo Games. In it, the player attempts to rescue as many citizens as possible from an oncoming zombie horde using helicopter rescue units and an array of military units to protect the citizens and defeat the zombies.
Plague Inc. is a real-time strategy simulation video game, developed and published by UK-based independent video game studio Ndemic Creations. The player creates and evolves a pathogen in an effort to annihilate the human population with a deadly pandemic. The game uses an epidemic model with a complex and realistic set of variables to simulate the spread and severity of the plague. It was released on 26 May 2012 for iOS and Microsoft Windows, 4 October 2012 for Android and 2015 for Windows Phone.
Pox: Save the People is a board game that challenges 1-4 players to stop the spread of a deadly disease that threatens to take over the community. It was developed at the Tiltfactor Laboratory in collaboration with the Mascoma Health Initiative to help stop the spread of misinformation regarding the effects of vaccination. An iPad app of the same name was released in 2011 and won "Best Digital Game" at Meaningful Play, 2012.
Awkward Moment® is a party game that puts 3-8 players in awkward social situations. It was developed by the Tiltfactor Lab as part of a National Science Foundation-funded project called “Transforming Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) For Women and Girls: Reworking Stereotypes & Bias.” It is a 20 minute game for middle and high school students. The game won Meaningful Play's best non-digital game award in 2012.
Adam Saltsman, also known as Adam Atomic, is an American indie video game designer best known for creating the endless runner Canabalt. He is a founder of Semi Secret Software and Finji video game studios.
Solar 2 is an open world sandbox video game developed by Australian developer Jay Watts' video game studio, Murudai. It was released on June 17th, 2011 on Steam for Microsoft Windows and on June 19th, 2011 on Xbox Live Indie Games for the Xbox 360. The game was developed with Microsoft's XNA tools, and its development was inspired by indie games such as flOw. The game follows the player in their mission to accumulate enough mass to become several astronomical objects, eventually becoming a Big Crunch, which then produces a Big Bang.
LyteShot was an interactive augmented reality gaming platform.
Renga is a shoot 'em up video game developed and published by British studio wallFour. Designed for movie theaters for up to one hundred players, players are given laser pointers and are tasked with cooperatively building and defending a space ship. It was showcased at 2012's Indiecade, where it won the Developers Choice Award.