A LOSING GAME

ON A FRIDAY MORNING IN OCTOBER, ABOUT 100 high school and college students gathered in a Utah ballroom to play a game.

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Some students were assigned specific roles and given costumes to wear. “Government officials” slung ties over their T-shirts; “store clerks” sported aprons; and a trio of “journalists” wore fedoras and carried fake microphones.

Kambree Carlile, 16, played a “health care worker” and was given full protective gear to wear, including goggles and gloves. As students started getting “sick” with a mysterious and deadly pathogen, panic surged, Carlile says. “It wasn’t a real scenario, but people still got very frantic,’ she says.

Students thronged the health care and public-health stations for advice and vaccines, ignoring calls by workers to socially distance. One “infected” student ran around, intentionally coughing on people, causing panic.

One of the “journalists,” 17-year-old Kenadi Burlingame, complained that it had been hard at times to get anyone to listen to her. “The ‘public-health’ people told us that we need to start getting people to quarantine, but I felt like no one really did that. They didn’t see the importance in it,” she says. “That was frustrating.”

Meanwhile, the “biomedical researchers,” who donned white lab coats and were tasked with identifying the pathogen, were baffled by the myriad symptoms that sick people were reporting, including fever, aching muscles, and malaise. “It could be anything,” one of them lamented as she googled people’s symptoms and uncovered a long list of possible diseases.

The students were playing Operation Outbreak, a game that simulates the spread of an infectious disease. During the game, participants use an app on their phones, which alerts them when their avatars are infected and lists their symptoms. The pathogen “spreads” via Bluetooth, from phone to phone.