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 an American 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 took place between September 13 and October 8, 2005, in World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Blizzard Entertainment. When participating in a certain boss battle at the end of a raid, player characters would become infected with a debuff that was transmitted between characters in close proximity. While developers intended to keep the effects of the debuff within this boss's game region, a programming oversight soon led to an in-game pandemic throughout the fictional world of Azeroth.
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 January 31, 2013. A version originally sold with the Humble Indie Bundle 11 in 2014 added support for Linux and OS X.
Tracy Fullerton is an American game designer, educator and writer, best known for Walden, a game (2017). She is a Professor in the USC Interactive Media & Games Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Game Innovation Lab at USC.
Lindsay Grace is an American academic, artist, and video game designer. He currently serves as the Knight Chair of Interactive Media and is also an Associate Professor at the School of Communication, University of Miami. .
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. Game types include video games, live-action games, and tabletop games. Independent game developers are selected to demo, screen, and promote their work at the annual IndieCade festival and showcase events. IndieCade also includes a conference track featuring classes, panels, workshops, and keynotes. Since 2020, the annual festival has taken place online under the name IndieCade Anywhere & Everywhere.
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 video game developed by British and Canadian independent developer The Indie Stone. The game is set in the post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested exclusion zone of the fictional Knox Country, Kentucky, United States, 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.
Botanicula is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Amanita Design. The game was released on 19 April 2012, for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The game was later ported to iOS and Android.
Plague Inc. is a real-time strategy simulation video game, developed and published by UK-based independent video game studio Ndemic Creations. The game was inspired by the 2011 film Contagion and the 2008 Adobe Flash game Pandemic 2. The player creates and evolves a pathogen 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, 4 October 2012 for Android and 13 May 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.
Terry Cavanagh is an Irish video game designer based in London, England. He has created over two dozen games, most notably VVVVVV, Super Hexagon, and Dicey Dungeons.
Dark Room Sex Game is a rhythm-oriented party video game released on February 2008 for Windows and MacOS. It was designed and developed by a team of seven students of various nationalities. Subtitled "Can I touch your Wiimote?", it is presented as a sex game without graphics. The game runs on a fully black screen, and the gameplay is based solely on sound information and haptics. A player needs to find a rhythm with their partner, and gradually accelerate to a target frequency, representing the orgasm. The game is playable with a keyboard or the Wiimote, and supports up to four players.
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.
Everything is Going to Be OK is a 2017 work of digital art by alienmelon, the pseudonym of independent net artist Nathalie Lawhead. Described by Lawhead as an "interactive zine", the work is a vignette of several non-linear and interactive elements informed by Lawhead's experiences with "struggle, survival and coping with the aftermath of surviving bad things". The work received positive reception from publications, with attention directed to the game's use of humor to humanise and relate to experiences of trauma and victimhood, and received several awards and nominations at the Independent Games Festival, IndieCade, and A-MAZE. Following release of the work, Lawhead experienced online and offline harassment when showcasing it at Double Fine's Day of the Devs event in November 2017, prompting a discussion from Lawhead and media publications about the challenges of publishing and exhibiting experimental or art games and the risks of online harassment relating to streaming of these works.