Public health practitioners respond to a wide variety of disease events.   Professional games place responders in situations where they face the decisions, conflicts, and challenges that they would experience in a real event. Playing professional games can help everyone understand the complex, inter-agency, challenges that often come up during these situations.

In this book we describe how to design professional games for disease response.  We cover all forms of disease, from chronic and non-infectious diseases to bio-terrorism events.  We intersperse discussions of game design with examples of games, from games on mental health services to naturally occurring infectious disease outbreaks.  In addition we discuss aspects of disease response that you need to understand in order to avoid common pitfalls in designing these games.

Professional game designers are often called upon to design games that involve disease outbreak.  Public health professionals can find themselves playing in, or sponsoring, games on disease response.  Both groups can benefit from an understanding of the basic concepts of game design, disease response, and gaming disease response.

The book is available direct from Amazon 

This book is the first of a new series, each volume explores a particular area of warfare through the use of wargames. Each game has been crafted to examine different aspects of the conflict. Playing these games, along with reading the supporting designer’s notes, aims to help the reader actively develop their understanding through experiential learning. The goal is to help them develop a deeper understanding than from just reading primary and secondary sources about the war. Reading memoirs and commentary is essential, but so is making command decisions, such as looking at the conceptual map of the Falkland Islands and pondering how close to move the British aircraft carriers to the land action. It is in this space that wargaming rules supreme in the taxonomy of interactive learning techniques.

This book contains four games:

Game #1: Matrix Game- where it is possible for the wider conflict to be resolved without a land battle on East Falklands.

Game #2: The Falklands War: Task Force Commander- looks at the decisions made by the Royal Navy to support the amphibious landings and subsequent advance to Stanley. It is essentially a game about naval risk management.

Game #3: Battalion Commander- explores the land battle; often decisions in the planning stage set out the path to subsequent success or failure.

This includes a sample scenario the Battle for Goose Green

Game #4: The Falklands II (1984)- was a professional wargame designed Paddy Griffith about a potential second Argentine invasion several years after the Falklands War. It includes a detailed model of Cold War air combat. The game demonstrated that a second Argentine invasion would initially be successful.

The book is published by the History of Wargaming Project as part of ongoing work to document the development of wargaming.