Time to kill, time to heal: The medicalized aesthetics of time in Plague Inc: Evolved1

Plague Inc (2012) is a strategy game in which players develop pathogens to eliminate, control or zombify the world’s population. The game integrates biomedical models, visual practices and knowledge formations into visual language, terminology and the representation of the temporal course of disease. The article examines the intertwining of medical theorems – in particular evolutionism, epidemiology and public health – with temporal processes and their representation within the ludonarrative structure of the game. Methodologically, a theoretical discussion of concepts of time is followed by an analysis of temporal regimes in epidemiology and public health. Building on this, the epidemiological semantics and chronotopic structures in Plague Inc are elaborated.