Book part:

Worum es sich zu spielen lohnt: Krankheit im Brettspiel am Beispiel von PANDEMIE

The cooperative board game PANDEMIC invites players to fight four deadly diseases which are spreading worldwide. The paper examines the implications of picking disease as the theme for a board game. ›Disease‹ is a normative term and describes a condition as deficient, as unwanted, as something you want to get rid of. It is characterized by its appellative nature that, similar to the fight-or-flight response, may manifest itself in the motivation both to combat or to suppress the disease. Furthermore, the paper analyzes how the game addresses and exploits these different motives in dealing with disease: On the one hand, it is an ideal adversary to encourage the players to cooperate in combat. On the other hand, the game components have a tendency toward abstracting disease and suppressing references to personal experiences of illness: PANDEMIC portrays disease as an obstacle which can be removed through the efficient allocation of resources and logistical operations. The extent to which the game perpetuates problematic tendencies of the modern health care system is explored in the last part of this paper.