Abstract: Pox and the City, funded by NEH Digital Start Up grant, is a high level prototype that explores the social history of late 18th century medical practice and the invention of the smallpox vaccine.
Game overview and experimental focus: There is an increased awareness within heritage preservation and history that the invisible part of any culture, including intangible heritage associated with material objects, is an important aspect of understanding the past. Video games have the potential to immerse players in an interactive world. However, educational history games have been fairly limited in their approach and have tended to ignore the social and cultural aspects of history. Pox and the City is a role playing game that explores narrative and gameplay strategies in order to focus on the social history of smallpox vaccination. The basic design of the game is based on the three body problem: that medical progress depends on the interaction of the doctor, the patient and the disease. Players have to successfully interact with different social classes, make business decisions and treat patients with a number of different illnesses in order to complete the game. In addition, the project brings in archival documents as primary source material that the player must access through the library in order to complete minigames and quests. The gameplay of Pox and the City focuses on social interaction rather than abstracted plague mechanisms to express the complex historic social issues that faced early 19th century doctors in Edinburgh, Scotland.
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