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Our game, Love Bug, is titularly named after — you guessed it — the Love Bug virus that spread and infected over 10 million Windows computers in early 2000. Our game shares similarities with the real Love Bug by also spreading by taking advantage of users’ contacts/connections to send infected mail. We represent this with a node network to show connections between friends. As turns progress, players also build more connections with other players/NPCs, demonstrating how people’s social networks grow over time and also increase the risk of becoming infected or coming into contact with someone who is infected. Additionally, our game incorporates real maneuvers to avoid infection through actions such as deleting mail (and we’re also considering adding firewall tokens that imitate a firewall’s defense against viruses). However, just like in real life, deleting mail and severing communication with others can negatively impact the player’s relationship with the mail sender, so this isn’t always a viable strategy to avoid infection.

We abstract the game by simplifying how many connections each player has, or how wide their reach is. The node graph is not representative of the real interweb, but it is sufficient to model the spread at a small scale. We further abstracted from the real bug by focusing on individual connections, whereas the real Love Bug also spread through email servers — which we are incapable of fully modeling in such a confined setting.

The main difference between our system and the Love Bug is that the real virus was sent en masse to all of a user’s contacts whereas our game shows a gradual spread over turns by sending emails individually to contacts. We decided to make this change for playability, as sending en masse would immediately out the infected players and reduce the fun.