The idea has been banging around in my head of either making some kind of RPG campaign where the player(s) are communicable disease investigators, or else somehow cobbling together a point and click adventure game about the same.
I remember when playing the Vampire PC game by Troika how when the new blood borne disease showed up in town, they portrayed CDC guys standing around on every corner in biohazard suits. That was hilarious and ridiculous because if something like that really did happen and the CDC sent people to assist the local public health agency, they would go through great lengths to be very discrete. Ever since I played that game I've been thinking about how interesting, from a character-driven perspective, a good disease investigation adventure game could be.
The following is a basic idea of how, say, an outbreak investigation on the street could go in a game.
The game would focus on effectively questioning various people in the appropriate way to get the most information, building relationships and trust with community members, and becoming familiar with physical locales and knowing who is likely to be where at any given point in time. You use your relationships of trust to convince people to get the medical screening they need and you collect the statistics. Based on your knowledge of the disease process and epidemiology you figure on certain people being at greater or lesser risk and make the decision to continue or end the investigation. There's elements of danger, too. You yourself could get exposed to the disease in question. If you manage to set the wrong person off he may attempt to murder you in certain circumstances.
I was never a fan of adventure games where every attempt to murder you automatically succeeds, but I'd still consider the attempted murder a "game over", because realistically, whether or not you're actually dead or seriously injured, if something like that did happen, it would mess up your relationship with that group of people enough to pretty much blow your investigation out of the water. Maybe at that point the game ends, we tally your score, and then we roll the dice to find out if you survived or not, because if you died, you get a big fat zero. Maybe you can waste chargen points at the beginning of the game on martial arts skills that serve no purpose in game, except that they help your dice roll vs. murder when something like this happens, thus possibly helping to save your score.
If you got exposed to the disease, a dice roll would determine if you dodge the bullet, or if you get infected. There's often infection probabilities already established in medical literature. Depending on what the disease is, getting infected could be really awful, or else it could just only be moderately negative. Either way it probably wouldn't kill you or ruin your life before the campaign ends, so it would just count against your final score, with the tragicness and severity of your new medical condition dictating how big of a hit your score takes. Heh, maybe there should also be a roll for if your health insurance throws you under the bus or not.
