Pandemic response game icons

In order to assist the designers of pandemic response serious games, I have compiled and prepared a set of 68 COVID-19 themed game icons. These are available in zipped folders in three graphic formats: jpgs, pngs, and transparent pngs.

• COVID-19 JPG
• COVID-19 PNG
• COVID-19 transparent PNG

We typically use these in conjunction with 25mm or 37mm disks, the latter being the size included in the Matrix Game Construction Kit. These can be formatted for 3/4″ and 1″ Avery labels respectively using Avery’s excellent online design application and label templates. However, you can use them in any way you wish for the purposes of education and scenario analysis relating to the Covid-19 pandemic.

For further resources, see PAXsim’s COVID-19 serious gaming resources page.

COVID-19 serious gaming resources

This post is intended to aid those who might be developing or facilitating serious games about COVID-19 pandemic response for policy development or educational reasons. It will be updated as we come across new resources.

If you know of any resources, please drop us a note. Note that we are not interested in hobby/entertainment games at this point (although if someone wants to do a review essay on several of these for PAXsims, we would be happy to consider it).

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Simulation Resources: PAXsims

• Gaming the vaccine (posted 5 January 2022)
• Preparing for the Doomsday Variant (posted 20 November 2021)
• Review: Gaming disease response (posted 5 May 2021)
• COVID Buster: An Epidemic Crisis Management Game (6 January 2021)
• Moving online: Thoughts on digital learning games in the COVID-19 era (30 September 2020)
• Pellegrino: Distributed Gaming Taxonomy (18 August 2020).
• G4C: Games as essential tools for pandemic planning and response (14 August 2020)
• Nature: Two decades of pandemic war games failed to account for Donald Trump (7 August 2020)
• After the Apex – The Dilemma Game (7 August 2020)
• Flatten Island (posted 14 July 2020)
• COVID-19 game (posted 2 July 2020)
• After the Apex: A game of exit strategies from COVID-19 (posted 26 June 2020)
• Distributed gaming in the pandemic era (posted 28 May 2020)
• Exercise Cygnus pandemic report (2016) (posted 15 May 2020)
• “Survive COVID-19” browser game (posted 6 May 2020)
• US now gaming COVID-19 potential as adversary bioweapon (posted 24 April 2020)
• Post-pandemic scenarios (posted 19 April 2020)
• KWN: Roberts on “wargaming in a post-pandemic world” (posted 8 April 2020)
• “Flattening the Curve” matrix game report (posted 3 April 2020)
• Aplatir la courbe (posted 2 April 2020)
• WHO COVID-19 training exercise (posted 2 April 2020)
• GUWS: Gaming the non-kinetic (May 13)
• Engle: COVID-19 hospital matrix gaming ideas (posted 30 March 2020)
• KWN: Online workshop on wargaming the pandemic (posted 28 March 2020)
• Gaming the supermarket supply chain: pandemic edition (posted 26 March 2020)
• MORS online course on gaming emergency disease response (posted 24 March 2020)
• KWN: Online workshop on gaming the pandemic (posted 20 March 2020)
• “Crimson Contagion” – What Can We Learn? (posted 19 March 2020)
• “Flattening the Curve” COVID-19 matrix game (posted 19 March 2020)
• Gaming the pandemic: Do No Harm (posted 18 March 2020)
• Pandemic response game icons (posted 16 March 2020)
• King’s Wargaming Network support for COVID-19 serious games (posted 16 March 2020)
• Reflections from an infectious disease outbreak matrix game (posted 11 March 2020)
• Gaming African Swine Fever (posted 9 March 2020)
• Pandemic response matrix game (posted 4 April 2019)
• Gaming the semi-cooperative (posted 2 February 2016)

Simulation Resources: Others

• Active Learning in Political Science
  • Virtual public policy simulation on tackling COVID-19 (27 July 2020)
• Centre for Health Security, Johns Hopkins University
  • Clade X exercise (2018)
• Operation Outbreak
  • Operation Outbreak

• Nature
  • Two decades of pandemic war games failed to account for Donald Trump (4 August 2020)
• US Naval War College
  • Benjamin Davies, Heath Brightman, Jacob Brostuen, David Polatty, Brittany Card, Urban Outbreak 2019 Pre-Analytic “Quick Look” (US Naval War College, 2019).
  • Benjamin Davies,  Kaitlin Rainwater Lovett, Brittany Card, David Polatty, Urban Outbreak 2019 Pandemic Response: Select Research & Game Findings (US Naval War College, 2019).
  • “The Naval War College Ran a Pandemic War Game in 2019. The Conclusions Were Eerie,” Military.com, 1 April 2020.
• Wilson Center
  • Elizabeth Newbury, Exploring the Complexity of Pandemics Through Play, CTRL Forward, 17 March 2020.
• World Economic Forum

• World Health Organization
  • TTX: Pandemic Influenza Simulations
  • Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) training: Simulation exercise (2020)
• Other
  • “As Delta Wave Wanes, Israel Prepares for Doomsday Variant,” Haaretz, 19 November 2021.
  • “Can wargaming strengthen government response to catastrophic events?” War Room, 28 May 2020.
  • Hanna Allam, “War-Gamed Pandemic Disaster Unfolds In Real Time,” NPR, 19 May 2020.
  • Tara O’Toole,  Mair Michael,  Thomas V. Inglesby, “Shining Light on “Dark Winter”,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 34, 7, 1 (April 2002).
  • Sebastian Funk, Marcel Salathé and Vincent A. A. Jansen, “Modelling the influence of human behaviour on the spread of infectious diseases: a review,” Interface, 26 May 2010.
  • Emily K. Brunson et al, “The SPARS Pandemic 2025–2028: A Futuristic Scenario to Facilitate Medical Countermeasure Communication,” Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communications Research, 3, 1 (2020).
  • Uri Friedman, “We Were Warned,” The Atlantic, March 2020.
  • Before Trump’s inauguration, a warning: ‘The worst influenza pandemic since 1918′, Politico, 16 March 2020.
  • Matteo Menapace, “What does Pandemic (the game) teach us about the COVID-19 pandemic?” There Will Be Games, 17 March 2020.
  • “Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded,” New York Times, 19 March 2020.
  • Mark Perry, “America’s Pandemic Wargames Don’t End Well,” Foreign Policy, 1 April 2020.
  • Victoria Gibson, “How Ontario planned for a crisis before COVID-19 hit,” iPolitics, 9 April 2020.

COVID-19 Data Resources

• World Health Organization
• European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (EU)
• Centers for Disease Control (US)
• Our World in Data – Coronavirus Pandemic
• Imperial College COVID-19 resources
• Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center
• Worldometer: Coronavirus
• COVID Tracking Project
• Epidemic Calculator
• Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker
• Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (US)
• Conflict, Development, and COVID-19 (Political Settlements Research Programme)
• Pandemic Response Repository (New America)
• Reich Lab COVID-19 Forecast Hub (US)
• Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases 
• COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker

King’s Wargaming Network support for COVID-19 serious games

Ivanka Barzashka, Director of the Wargaming Network at King’s College London, has announced a programme of grants to support serious gaming on the current COVID-19 global pandemic:

King’s has an important opportunity and responsibility to use our research expertise in support of the international response to the COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) outbreak. This goes beyond efforts to find treatments – for example into the effects of the outbreak on mental health (including through isolation), broader social and economic questions for society, the functioning of healthcare systems (including in developing countries). How can wargaming contribute to these questions?

King’s College London is offering pilot funding for King’s Wargaming Network research teams to engage with strategic partners on rapid research on this topic. Through the King’s Together programme, we will offer grants of up to £20k for groups of researchers to start work, across all disciplines.

Proposals are due 18 March and decisions will be announced on 20 March. Please contact me as soon as possible if you have an idea for a project.

Ivanka Barzashka
Director, Wargaming Network
School of Security Studies
King’s College London

The PAXsims team stands ready to assist applicants—email us if we can be of help. Please note that this is a time for client-driven, needs-driven serious gaming: it isn’t useful to propose projects that do not meet identified needs, which distract attention from more urgent tasks, or which consume human resources (such as subject matter expertise) better used in other ways.