[daeglin]

Hi, game author here.

First, this URL https://covidgame.info/ loads the game in English by default. There was a plan to popularize the game outside of Czechia but, frankly, we missed the window when major news outlets were interested.

To address few points mentioned in the comments: the game was tuned to the specific situation in Czech Republic around end of 2020 / beginning 2021. The goal was to build basic quantitative intuition about the behavior of the epidemiological model (SEIR model) that the general public and decision makers were lacking. The game doesn't allow for zero covid strategy - because that was never realistically considered. Likewise, we after some considerations, we didn't include cheap interventions like extensive testing, contact tracing and better government communication. This doesn't mean that we didn't support such interventions. However, Czech government proved unwilling or incapable to implement such measures and in the short/medium term broad restrictions were the only "levers" the decision makers could pull.

There is an interview for a major Czech Internet server about some aspects of the game development: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=cs&tl=en&u=https:/...

We were working together with some real experts in Covid modelling and the model was in my opinion quantitatively sound (though, as we repeatedly said, the model was not optimized for scientific accuracy). At the end the was played by some members of the parliament, party experts and even ministers. We know that the game helped to facilitate consensus between the government and opposition in a very fragile political situation. I believe that, at the end, the game saved hundreds or thousands lives by helping to implement some necessary restrictions sooner than they'd be implemented otherwise.

[noduerme]

Wonderful, sparse, essential simulation. The stark choices and the resulting reminders of what really happened (and how the player matches up) is a great eye-opener for the general public. The fact that it forces you to make decisions in realtime and feel the lag behind them is really brilliant as a thing to put in front of decision-makers in parliament. One of the most difficult things with covid was the inability to see a few weeks into the future, because our minds are not equipped to think in terms of exponentially multiplying consequences. This gives a really elegant, intuitive form to a very conceptually difficult set of variables.

The beauty of the concept is its simplicity, as well. It's a bit like an IFR training panel, or early text-based video games. You can't see where the plane is or where it's going, you only see the instrument readouts after you adjust something. Since we have all been flying blind, this is a great experience to put in front of people, simply of what it's like to adjust and wait.

Five stars, sending it to all the devs I know, also as a way to make a very engaging sim on a complex topic for people with no prior art =D

[daeglin]

Moon Lander was fairly explicitly inspiration for this game :-)

[FabHK]

Awesome work.

Astral Codex Ten (the reincarnated Slate Star Codex) has an informative article on the effectiveness of lockdowns that references and employs this simulation:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...

ETA: The post contains a graph of the frontier of pareto-efficient outcomes against which you might want to measure yourself when playing.

See also this blogpost by one of the epidemiologists working on the game: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

[daeglin]

BTW, source code is available here: https://github.com/swehq/corona-game

[uzakov]

This is honestly great! Could you please add a license? I would love to translate this and deploy in other languages.

[daeglin]

Please contact us at [e-mail] . The game is "open source" but we didn't explicitly specify what exactly that means. I consider the owners of the code to be the company swehq.com that did most of the coding.

[pmontra]

Meta question to the author about the spread of information: you registered your account a few hours ago apparently to post answers here, how did you know that your game was on HN?

[mattowen_uk]

I'm going to guess that the author checked where their site visitors were coming from.

[daeglin]

Pointed out by a good friend :)

[daeglin]

[game author here] Note that I am Czech living in the US. Czech Republic and USA are the countries I follow most though I had discussions with other (mostly European expats).

Note on the "social stability score": the game population is by design very "permissive" people will generally not revolt even if you implement very harsh lockdowns of if many people die. This is because we primarily wanted to allow the player to explore the epidemiological model even for fairly extreme strategies (and public opinion is hard to model anyways). In addition, we expect that most player will play the game only once and we didn't want to frustrate too many new players by "game over" screens.

For context: here is how I see what was happening in Czechia. The spring 2020 was handled well and country avoided any significant surge in Covid cases. During summer 2020, people get used to the pandemic. New view got a significant traction: Covid is not that serious and the best course was to let it sweep through the population and gain natural herd immunity.

Since then, there was a constant tug of war between side wishing to relax the rules and the side wishing for stricter rules. Every time the disease started to decline, the "relax rules" side gained more traction and every time the hospitals were close to the capacity (or arguably above the capacity), the government implemented fairly strict measures (there was a strong consensus that everybody must be able to get healthcare).

This explains why the popular "zero covid" and "no intervention" strategies were never attempted. It is hard to tell how well our model works for these strategies. My guess is "not too poorly" but the we have much better confidence in the model in the regime much closer to real world behavior of the country.

[pedrig]

Coolio! :) I built something similar [0] a while ago. My goal was to _visually_ demonstrate how fast a virus can spread. I wanted to make it is easy for everyone to get an understanding about exponential growth and how different measures can have a great impact on the spread of a virus.

Disclaimer: This is an unpolished toy project. It was built in a weekend by simple dude who likes to code but has no idea about virology and epidemiology.

[0]: https://patricsteiner.github.io/corona-simulator/

[Robotbeat]

This is really cool. I think it'd be interesting to model decarbonization in a similar manner, with social stability and debt and deaths.

[rob74]

This Covid-19 simulation, where you can have a more or less reliable model because you are basically doing it after the fact, already has enough potential for controversy - e.g. the "social stability" metric, is it too sensitive? Not sensitive enough? For decarbonization, where you don't have a reliable model, you will probably be accused by both sides that you're underestimating or overestimating the various parameters involved. Do you want to open this can of worms?

[Robotbeat]

Well, we’ve got to! and it would be nice to open up the game to different assumptions. Like, I tried Covid zero in this game, and although I never got to zero it ended up minimizingz the deaths. Games like this can be useful for at least explaining ones ideas even if the games aren’t “realistic”.

I think for decarbonization, you wouldn’t need to take as drastic of steps is taken for Covid. But if your policies are unpopular, it will be a lot easier to lose political power as the timeline is ten times as long. It only takes slightly unpopular policies to be kicked out of power. So I think that aspect would help people who think we can do extreme measures for climate change (ie abandon most of the suburbs in a decade for denser urban cores more easily served by public transit) kind of temper their views a bit and think of more politically viable methods of fighting climate change (electric cars, etc). Of course it be nice to be able to modify the game to explain other arguments, like effects that redistribution might have making those changes more politically viable. But of course like most kinds of social science Model, it’s really more of an explanation/exposition than a prediction

[zelphirkalt]

Well, it would be a game or simulation after all. It could be improved over time with new knowledge. So it wouldn't hurt to try.

[daeglin]

[game author here] This forum is rate-limiting my posts so I am not able to respond to each particular thread.

I am guessing that the renewed interest in our game is coming from the recent post at Astral Codex Ten: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness... It is well worth reading that post.

Let me also link a post from one of our collaborators explaining how, for most countries, the dichotomy between saving lives and economy was somewhat false and relative to the real outcomes it was possible to improve both: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

A lot of the discussion on this forum center around the question what was the optimal policy and how well the game simulated that policy. In particular, there is a lot of discussion around the two "extreme" approaches: "zero covid" and "no interventions". That is fine, we had these discussions many times and we can explain how these approaches are represented in the game (in my opinion, not too unrealistically) but, at the same time, it somewhat misses the point. The game was about building intuition about simple epidemiological SEIR model close to the regime where the real country was operating - and for political reasons it was very unlikely that the country will radically change the course.

Lot of the game design decisions were some compromise between different goals of the game. Let me give an example: the team of authors of the game strongly believes that expanding contract tracing would a good thing. We were considering adding it to the game. However, what would be a point of adding that option to the game? It would further clutter UI (we had mobile users on mind). It would not add anything to the game because the decision to expand tracing would have no significant downside. And last it would hardly add anything to the public debate, it would just communicate that the authors of the game like contact tracing. There were already zillion of well argued opinion pieces on the topic. In fact, failures of contact tracing were more about failures of the specific agency than any conscious decision on the decision maker side. In short, tacking this issue in the game would quickly move from mathematical modeling into much more murky waters of public service efficiency.

You should also keep in mind that the game was just a small piece in a bigger mosaic of truly incredible efforts of many other volunteers. E.g. "Interdisplinary group for epidemic situations" https://www.meses.cz/. The game was never intended to provide comprehensive picture or recommendations.

[RVuRnvbM2e]

> The game doesn't allow for zero covid strategy - because that was never realistically considered.

The game should model this because it is the only strategy that has been shown to be actually effective, and might make people realise how badly governments handled this.

[noduerme]

I think the point of the art is to show people how difficult it is to do the best you can with the tools available, and also to instruct them how to over-adjust with those tools and ease off them. To over-steer and then realign the direction of flight. What you're suggesting is: Give everyone an automatic transmission so no one ever shifts gears at the wrong time. What this game shows is: Here is how you shift gears before a curve, and what to expect if you shift too soon or too late. That is a fantastically more complicated and important thing to take away from a simulation than, "if we just turn everything on, problem solved."

[littlestymaar]

> What you're suggesting is: Give everyone an automatic transmission so no one ever shifts gears at the wrong time. […]"if we just turn everything on, problem solved."

Not at all. A zero-covid strategy doesn't mean “Covid doesn't happen, nothing to do here”. It means locking down entire cities as soon as a few case of unknown origin are diagnosed, and doing so every time the situation occurs: it's not a one time medicine, you must be ready to to enact local lockdowns many times.

Australia, Vietnam, China, South Korea, etc. saved hundred thousands of lives by taking extreme measures super early on. Locking down 7 million people when 9 cases have been found is an extremely tough political decision to make, but it has been immensely successful (both from the health and economy point of view). The western world has been completely oblivious to this strategy since the beginning of the pandemic, and not allowing this kind of strategy in a game is just going to reinforce this idea that there is no alternative to the deadly “flatten the curve” strategy.

[noduerme]

I agree with your basic view, and if I were a dictator with absolute power, that's exactly what I'd do. NZ and Australia are "the western world", but they happen to be sparsely populated islands. Vietnam and China are totalitarian dictatorships. South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are to their credit more rational and law-abiding, but they've also struggled with surges after they thought they had a handle on it.

I was an advocate for full lockdown in the US two weeks before the government even acknowledged the problem. I was already in quarantine a week before they did, and we isolated on a farm for a year until we got both shots. But the reality is we're in a country where we can't even convince people to get the vaccine now, much less skip spring break.

I don't think it's sending a message that total lockdown isn't an option. In fact, it's an option in the game. Lockdown in EU countries was much more severe than it was in the US. And Czechia is a landlocked nation at the heart of Europe, so closing borders is a wild and drastic thing in that context... much more so than in NZ, for example, which has rightly been called the "bolt-hole of billionaires" for the apocalypse.

I agree that we could have stopped this in its tracks if we had locked down Seattle and New York completely at the end of 2/2020. But I suspect it would have ended up in rural Missouri eventually anyway. And once it's endemic and the only option is to flatten the curve, there's no point in a simulation of a scenario that had no basis in reality, and there's still a lot of value in teaching people what flattening the curve means: preemptively locking down and closing before things get astronomically out of hand.

[littlestymaar]

> Vietnam and China are totalitarian dictatorships. But the reality is we're in a country where we can't even convince people to get the vaccine now, much less skip spring break.

Not American so I can't judge about there, but in Europe, most countries closed restaurants and theaters for almost 6 months, schools for more than 3 months, people where submitted to curfews and harsh circulation restrictions (cannot go farther than 10km from your house without a justification and papers to prove so − in France for almost 4 month in total). and borders where closed for months (my brother in the UK couldn't practically come to France fro the 5 first months of this year). And people where sent to jail for not respecting those restrictions. It's not like the western world acted like “freedom-loving countries”, overall there were much more, and much longer freedom limitations in France, Italy and other European countries than there were in China.

The island vs continental countries is also a fallacy, there's been as many death in Cyprus and Malta (1.5M inhabitant together) than in NZ, Singapore, Vietnam and Taiwan grouped (more than 130M people living there). What's their excuse?

[CorrectHorseBat]

But you need one government that can lock everything down and control all borders easily. Controlling all borders would only have been viable on a EU level, but a unified strategy was and still is impossible.

[daeglin]

This.

Hermetically closing borders would be very hard for Czech Republic (with strong economic and personal ties to the neighboring countries). There was political will to go for zero covid strategy anyways.

If I was allowed to go for some dream solution it would be coordinated strategy on EU (or Schengen) level.

[edejong]

I very strongly second this. The zero COVID strategy with localized lockdowns and a high emphasis on tracing would have prevented millions of deaths worldwide.