H5N1 for Angry Birds: Plague Inc., Mobile Games, and the Biopolitics of Outbreak Narratives

Within its first week, Plague Inc. climbed to the top of Apple's App Store, effectively ending the ever-popular Angry Birds' reign as the top-selling iPhone game. The game's premise is simple: create a pathogen to kill every human on the planet. In this article, I examine the epidemiological images and structures in Plague Inc., suggesting that what Priscilla Wald has characterized as the “outbreak narrative” becomes reconfigured by the fictionalization of biosecurity in the biomedical imaginary according to the mobile game's media specificity. This digital mutation of the outbreak narrative speaks to the implications of mobile technologies in the apperception and expansion of biosecurity and biopolitical regulation. Within this framework, I explore how Plague Inc.'s narrative content and interactive functions hover somewhere between science fiction and science fact. Ultimately, Plague Inc. participates in the reinscription of anxieties relating to a bio-apocalypse and of the desire for the biogovermental process to control it. I suggest that analyzing the game's mechanics, narrative, and materiality, on the one hand, gives us a way to understand how the biopolitics of outbreak narratives work; on the other hand, we come to see the way the game also inculcates an acceptance of the biosecurity apparatus' regulating biopolitics.