Game Idea: Computer Anti-Rx (Computer Virus Pandemic)

Game:

The game pandemic is about creating a type of infection (bacteria, fungal or viral) and designing it in a way that will cause the world’s population to become infected and die from it. As your infection spreads through more of the population, you can upgrade the infection to be more resilient to the weather, easier to spread, or more severe symptoms and side-effects after caught. The more people you infect and the easier the symptoms are to notice, the quicker people start to find treatments for and treat the symptoms. So the upgrades need to start moving towards defenses against antivirals (and the like).

Compu-geddon takes a similar approach, but instead you engineer a computer exploit (worm, virus, web-hack) to infect as many computers as possible. As the exploit becomes more permissive throughout the ecosystem, the easier it might be discovered. But the more people who you can infect, the more valuable your exploit becomes.

Upgrades and Mechanics:

Spread, Persist, Malice.

Spread

Spread upgrades are routes that infection routes that to get more computers infected.

• Fake Email, Spam Email – Email From: <your-friend@fake-gmail.com> “Look at this great youtube link we found! “
• Fake Torrent of Popular TV/Movie/Computer Program – “Game of Thrones Season 3 Episode 2 [Legit]” <Like ~so~ Legit>
• Multi-Platform – Windows, Android, Mac. Doesn’t matter, can still infect.
• Infect through Popular Website – If I hack Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and you visit this site, then your machine has to download whatever I tell it to.
• Infect through Access Points – If you connect to my Wireless Router or an infected Wireless Router, e.g. your local infected Starbucks, then your machine is already compromised. Slash Smiley.

Persist

Persist upgrades are defense mechanisms that exploits put in place that make it harder to remove from the machine.

• Multiple Infection Points – My infection isn’t just in one file/location on your computer, but across many files. This makes it hard to pinpoint which file to delete to clean your machine
• -> Upgrade to Infect across network – Now my infection can re-infect itself as long as multiple machines are online on your home network, wired or wireless.

• Data Hostage (Ransom-ware) – You put a self-destruct on important files on the machine requiring a ransom in X days or else the file gets deleted from the machine. Usually they don’t hold up their end of the bargain and whether you pay or not, the infection spreads to other files.
• Replacement (Man in the Middle) – “Just doing my job, nothing to see here”. Replace a system-critical file with your “hacked’ version of the file. This makes it hard to remove because removal means your system becomes unstable/unusable. It’s also hard to find anything out of the ordinary through regular troubleshooting procedures because the normal set of files/executable programs are running.

Malice

Malice are the parts of the exploit that do the bad-touch on your machine.

• Find Personal Information – Address, Phone Book, Credit Card, Social Security Number, you name it. The more information that I can gather on infected people, the more my infection is worth. This includes the information that I already gathered, leading to credit fraud and other impersonation crimes.
• Key-logging – Instead of looking for sensitive information on your computer, I’ll wait for you to input sensitive information. Passwords, credentials, company trade secrets.

Game Modes:

Conquer the world

Similar to the standard mode in Pandemic, create the infection and watch it spread in the wild. Upgrade the infection as more people become aware of it and try to infect everything, or go for high score by accruing as much value on your infection as possible.

Scenarios

Say the plan was to infect a high-value target, e.g. Executive of Major Tech company. How could you go about doing this? Tailor your infection so that at some point it will spread to this high-value target to gather some sort of information from them.

Aside from the game possibly being an interesting sim-and-destroy game, it helps show the user-base what some of the unsafe routes are that lead to people having virus-infected machines and what the consequences of such are.

Other game ideas can be found HERE