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