Game Concept

Title: Neutralise the Pathogen

Concept Statement:

In Neutralise the Pathogen the player processes through the different levels of immunity the body has to defend against pathogens, allowing the player to deepen their knowledge of the immune system and its defence mechanisms.

Genre/Category:

Educational

This game is educational because it will educate the player on how the immune system within their body works, engagingly and educationally.

Concept Creation Process/Area and Influences:

The Idea for this game occurred during a Human Anatomy and Physiology lecture that I was in attendance for, which happened to be on the topic of the Immune system. Although I found the content quite engaging, the way the information was being presented to students was not motivational or engaging. Research done by Frontiers in Public Health (Xu et al., 2023), shows that game-based learning has grown rapidly as a new way of learning, including a rise in educational simulators or games for medical topics.

I plan to keep the game quite casual, I wish to make it interesting for the players, without overloading them with information. This could cause the player to find the content boring, or overwhelming, which can potentially cause them to lose interest in the game. My thought process to mix education with action was to help make the content a little more engaging, and interactive for the player, which will help them to deepen their understanding of the tactics the immune system uses against pathogens.

This game was also influenced by the fact that we have recently been through a global pandemic, which shed some light on the fact that it is not common knowledge within our communities to know how the immune system works. This led to some controversial topics about why such precautions were taken during the pandemic. Having more engaging ways to learn, can inspire people to have more of a positive outlook towards learning, instead of perceiving it as an endless reading of quite boringly long textbooks.

Audience and Competitive Analysis:

Similar game titles that are also based on the human immune system are Immune Quest, and Auto Immune (Distant Signal Game) which is coming soon to Steam. Other game titles that are about other medical topics are Medical Imaging VR (Hublab) and Medical Diagnostic Simulator (Arktos Cat) which is to be released in June this year. Immune Quest and Medical Imaging VR have progressed well, and the demand for Auto Immune and Medical Diagnostic Simulator are believed to excel, due to the demand for medical educational games rising, and the significant rise in educational games usage in schools, and for at-home learning. Other game titles failed within this category because they contained too much information that was not spaced out and presented engagingly. Which caused it to become overwhelming for the user, causing them to lose interest in the game.  

The last successful medical educational game was Cleft Island which is a game that is used to teach up-and-coming medical students the treatment protocols for patients with cleft lip and or cleft palate (Palee, Patison). This game was successful because it deepened the medical students understanding of the treatments for cleft lip and or cleft palate and gave them “real-world” experience and understanding without leaving the classroom.

Cleft Island

My competitors within this field would be other learning institutes, looking for a way to broaden their students’ knowledge and understanding of medical topics, and allowed them to engage in “real-world” experiences without leaving the classroom. My game will persevere because I don’t intend to make it just for students to use, I also wish for the general public to have access to the game to help broaden their knowledge about the immune system and use it to help their community during things like a global pandemic.

My target audience for this game is medical students, students studying a unit that involves the immune system, high school students during a health class, and people within the community who will benefit from learning about the immune system, e.g. Carers, People with allergies, Parents of a newborn baby, and people that are close to someone in the community with an autoimmune disease.

Game Treatment:

The player will progress through 6 different levels covering the 3 different levels of immunity the body has, the first level being Barriers, which will be broken down into 4 different levels covering all the types of barriers the body contains. The next level will introduce the player to the Innate immunity the body has, and the last level is the Active Immunity, which is the body’s last level of defence against a pathogen. This will allow the player to see how each layer of immunity works in conjunction with the other layers within the body when fighting against a pathogen.  Going through the different levels of immunity will also engage the player to learn and understand the different ways the body can encounter a pathogen.  

Some of the Key Features of the game include:

• The player gets to fight off different types of pathogens while playing as different cells that are used within the immune system to protect the body.
• Allow the player to choose what type of pathogen they play against at the beginning of a level, to broaden their understanding of how different pathogens interact with the body, and how the immune system comes up with different tactics to overcome each pathogen.
• If the player fails to fight off the pathogen, the game will jump to a cut scene explaining the consequences of not defeating the pathogen, and how it will affect the rest of the body.
• Each of the levels of the game will have mini-games within them, to help deepen the player’s knowledge about certain topics. An example of this would be Helping a T-Helper cell attach to a cell’s antigen and helping it work out if the antigen on the cell is a pathogen or a normal cell.
• The game will have optional side quests when the player hits a certain part of the game, allowing the player to branch off and learn about a component of the body that works in correlation with the immune system. An example of this would be a side quest about blood within the body, and how it helps the immune system, or learning about how vaccines work in correlation with the immune system.
• The game will have interactive quizzes throughout the levels, to help the player understand a certain part more in-depth. However, I do not plan to use them to block players from continuing unless they pass the quiz. I plan on using it to just have the player see how much information they have retained, without making it directly about learning.

Concept Art:

I believe that a cartoonish look would best match the game, more specifically where a non-humanoid object has been personified. This would allow the user to become more connected and automatically drawn to the game because the characters within the game will present with more connectivity due to the personification making the cells feel more humanoid to the player.

An example of this is Paul’s organs in the Disney short, Inner Workings designed by Nick Orsi (). The artists personified the person's organs, allowing the watchers to be more “connected” with them because the personal qualities given to the organs match that of the viewer.

Nick Oris, Concept Art

Basic Cell Structure (Done by me)

The backgrounds for the levels will consist of different places around the body where that part of the immune response happens, some of those places will include, blood vessels, lymph nodes, the stomach, skin, and the respiratory tract.

Heidi Moawad, Blood Vessel

Arthur Plawgo, Skin Microbiome            

University of Oxford, Gut Bacteria

References:

Arktos Cat. (2024) Medical Diagnostic Simulator. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2925880/Medical_Diagnostic_Simulator/ (Accessed: 18 April 2024)

Arthur Plawgo. (n.d.) Skin Microbiome, Animation. Available at: https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/1303601/view/skin-microbiome-animation (Accessed: 18 April 2024)

Cleft Island. (2020) Serious Game for Teaching Undergraduate Medical Students in Cleft Lip and Palate Treatment Protocol Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1386505619308603 (Accessed: 18 April 2024)

Distant Signal Games. (n.d.) Auto Immune. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2139330/Auto_Immune/ (Accessed: 18 April 2024)

Heidi Moawad. (2024) What Is Vascular Disease? Available at: https://www.verywellhealth.com/vascular-disease-5095545 (Accessed: 18 April 2024)

Hublab. (2020) Medical Imaging VR. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1471980/MedicalImagingVR/ (Accessed: 18 April 2024)

ImmuneQuest. (n.d.) Immune Quest. Available at: https://immunequest.com/ (Accessed: 18 April 2024)

Nick Oris. (2016) Disney Artists Are Sharing Concept Art from “Inner Workings”. Available at: https://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/disney-artists-sharing-concept-art-inner-workings-146712.html (Accessed: 18 April 2024)

Palee, Patison. Et al. (2020) Serious Game for Teaching Undergraduate Medical Students in Cleft Lip and Palate Treatment Protocol. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32570197/ (Accessed: 18 April 2024)

University of Oxford. (2023) Study Shows Diverse Gut Bacteria Communities Protect Against Harmful Pathogens by Nutrient Blocking. Available at: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-12-15-study-shows-diverse-gut-bacteria-communities-protect-against-harmful-pathogens (Accessed: 18 April 2024)

Xu, M. et al. (2023) Game-Based Learning in Medical Education, Frontiers in Public Health. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10020233/ (Accessed: 18 April 2024)