Roll to Save : Gaming Disease Response How to Construct Wargames in Support of Public Health Professionals

Public health practitioners respond to a wide variety of disease events. Professional games place responders in situations where they face the decisions, conflicts, and challenges that they would experience in a real event. Playing professional games can help everyone understand the complex, inter-agency, challenges that often come up during these situations. In this book we describe how to design professional games for disease response. We cover all forms of disease, from chronic and non-infectious diseases to bio-terrorism events. We intersperse discussions of game design with examples of games, from games on mental health services to naturally occurring infectious disease outbreaks. In addition we discuss aspects of disease response that you need to understand in order to avoid common pitfalls in designing these games.Professional game designers are often called upon to design games that involve disease outbreak. Public health professionals can find themselves playing in, or sponsoring, games on disease response. Both groups can benefit from an understanding of the basic concepts of game design, disease response, and gaming disease response.