Sweetheart vs Plague, Inc.

I hinted at dual events on our Memorial Day BBQ with the Friend family. Of course I already wrote about The Girl and ‘soon to be a boyfriend in another high school.’ Now let’s discuss his little sister.

Mr. Friend and I both did the military thing. He’s also a cop and has been for many years. Hubby did ROTC before deciding against military service, and he did the Cop thing for a while, which is how our families came to be friends. Mrs. Friend is a bit out of her depth with the three of us. She’s the nice one: the one that doesn’t think tactically or strategically — ever. It drives her nuts to watch movies with a firefight with us - we count bullets and argue about the realism of just about everything. It’s not that she has patience (she rolls her eyes and glares) she just recognizes a lost battle. And I’ll back her up when she’s had enough because that’s what friends do.

So that’s back story. When the dear little 11-year-old baby of the family, we’ll call her Sweetheart, came to join the adults because the teenagers were boring and she didn’t want to be alone, Hubby handed her an Android Tablet and set her up on Minecraft. Sweetheart was delighted. Then she discovered another game. And another. It just kept getting better.

The menfolk went off to discuss something Y-chromosomes were drawn to, and Mrs. Friend and I chatted about I can’t remember what. Sweetheart found a game called “Plague Inc.”

Now, for those not familiar with Plague Inc by Miniclip.com, it’s a game where you put in the parameters of a plague (vector, symptoms, abilities, etc) and try to wipe out humanity. It’s a little dark. This post is sort of timely with my summer cold, and the ebola outbreak in Africa. I’m really whining about one and intensely interested in the other.

Having known Mrs. Friend as long as I have, and knowing her teenage son and husband, I don’t know whether to be surprised it took as long as it did for her to notice what Sweetheart was playing, or that it didn’t take longer. The darling little kitten and pony-loving girl was out to kill humanity via a plague, and she kept asking me my opinion on symptoms, transmission vectors, and which immunities to build up.

Eventually Mrs. Friend perked up and asked “What are you playing?”

“Plague,” Sweetheart answered innocently as she cheered on the invasion of Greenland.

“Plague?”

“Yup. Just got Greenland. That’s important.”

“What?”

“Greenland,” I explained. “You have to infect Greenland before the world clues in that your plague is too deadly and infectious. If they close their borders before anyone there is infected, you can’t wipe out all of humanity.”

“Wipe out humanity?” she asked, looking more alarmed than I expected considering her background. She really should be used to this sort of thing.

“That’s the point of the game. To kill off everyone,” Sweetheart told her. “I’m a virus.”

Mrs. Friend looked at me. I shrugged. “It’s actually pretty realistic, so she’s learning something.”

“Yeah, how to be an evil genius!” Sweetheart laughed. That wasn’t helpful.

“I meant about how diseases spread. And I told her to start it in China or India, and the map doesn’t show country names or even borders, so you have to know geography,” I explained, trying to soften the blow to Mrs. Friend that her daughter was learning things, but in perhaps a more interesting way than she expected.

“Except I missed China and started in Russia,” Sweetheart said.

“Except for that. Learn your geography. China’s pretty big, kiddo.”

“So, it’s how realistic?” Mrs. Friend asked, probably thinking of graphics of corpses piling up and people bleeding from their eyes.

I should probably take a moment to say my bachelor’s degree is in biology. So we had a chat about past plagues and how epidemics work and so on.

The boys came back, and for some reason our discussion on epidemics turned into a case of ‘when the zombie apocalypse strikes’ and it all went downhill from there. It usually does when zombies get involved.

Sweetheart played a new round and named the virus ‘Zombies’ so messages kept popping up like: “Zombies has killed more people than smallpox” and so on. She got a giggle out of that. Mrs. Friend decided in the end the game was mildly educational, probably more so than Halo. Especially when I started saying things like: “Start in North Korea.”