Vax is a is a game about epidemic prevention. It’s also an interactive learning environment designed to visualize a process that strains our imagination:
A contagion spreading across a network
Players are tasked to prepare for an outbreak by vaccinating a network that resembles human social networks. After distributing vaccines, an infectious outbreak begins to spread and the player is tasked to quell the epidemic by quarantining individuals at risk of becoming infected.
Vax! is a puzzle-game infused with chance that was inspired by real-world challenges, infectious disease modeling, and addictively rewarding gameplay.
It was developed by Ellsworth Campbell, a PhD student in the Salathé Group at Penn State University. Graphic design by Isaac Bromley. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
I wanted Vax to be all of the following, and more…
-
An opportunity to unify two disparate passions: video games and science.
-
A tool to introduce a general audience to concepts related to infectious disease dynamics.
-
A data-driven method to illustrate how contact networks can affect infectious disease dynamics.
-
A widely accessible interactive framework to visualize, simulate, and experience an infectious processes spreading across/through a contact network.
-
A platform for a fledgling scientist, such as myself, to gain the experience and skills to do scientific outreach in the digital realm.
Before Vax, the extent of my web development experience is encompassed by this amazing Ruby on Rails tutorial. Therefore this web application is minimalist by-design. I’ve employed a few libraries, such as d3.js, jquery, and jqueryui. I’ve also employed a few gems to handle cookies, errors, and styling.
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent