Sneezy Peasy

I have just walked home in the lashing rain and it is definitely winter. My stupid brain has been whispering ‘you’ll catch your death in those wet things’ for the last five minutes so I have changed into my pyjamas beside the tumble dryer. My freezing hands were barely able to open the laptop but now that I have I think it’s time for a story by the fire.

So this is the heart warming story of a virus going viral. Ohhhhhh.

I have been playing sneeze, a delightful little game where you are a virus controlling some pathetic human host. The aim of the game is to make your host sneeze on some unsuspecting passers by to spread the virus. Each person you infect has the potential to sneeze on others and infect them. The more people you infect the better you do, easy peasy. There is some thought to put into who you sneeze at; old people don’t walk very far, and adults may have immunity to the virus; but you can pass the levels with pretty much no brain power at all.

This little office time waster was originally commissioned to teach children how germs spread. It cost an extraordinary amount of money for something that looks like a school child knocked it up in their lunch break just to gross out their mates. It managed to be fairly popular as these things go, and kids kinda liked how quickly you could skip through the science facts and get on with spraying snot about the place.

Then swine flu came along and changed everything, suddenly the game went viral and people all over the world were playing it and passing it on. Sudden success made people question it and, as with most games in the world, a lot of people don’t like it. As an educational tool it was targeted by those who think children should only be taught about puppy dogs and candy canes. The makers were interviewed for American television and found themselves entering into the ethical battle of ‘is it socially acceptable to teach children to sneeze on other people?’.

Interestingly this game has really only been noticed because of swine flu. A quick glance at Wikipedia says that it was commissioned to teach people about swine flu, which is a filthy lie. Forum links to it exclaim it as a swine flu animation, which again it is not. The game came first, so maybe swine flu was then invented to increase its publicity, who knows.

Right story time over, I am off to warm up in case I start to grow trotters and thus lose the ability to type. If you want to join the hype don’t forget to get your vaccination lest a heard of swine trample you to death over the Christmas holiday and check out Sneeze: http://www.routesgame.com/games/?challengeId=2