MooseHowl said:
Seems a bit odd to include Terraria on a list of survival games. Most of those games require some degree of personal upkeep; in Terraria, you don't have to eat anything, ever, and even the copious healing potion intake of an average Terrarian is entirely optional. Terraria is about as much of a survival game as Call of Duty, GTA, or various Mario games.
And Mario eats more mushrooms than a Terrarian ever will.
That was actually one of the (tiny) issues I had with Yahtzee's last ZP review; the talk of Starbound being a 'survival' game (and Terraria and Minecraft alongside it). I'd personally argue that all three games are more building/exploration than survival, with the monster element more to provide some necessary conflict. Any 'survival' (especially in Terraria's case, which is admittedly the only game of the three I've played... though I do own Starbound now) is more an incentive to create your first shelter, which takes all of about five minutes... and, in terms of Starbound, you're directed through it.
As I said, though, minor issue.
shiajun said:
Only one problem in your rabies comparison, Yahtzee. Rabies transmission from human to human is dismal in its efectiveness. For the virus, infecting a human most likely means a dead end, because even in the saliva glands the viral load is low. Most human to human transmission has happened from organ transplants.
I do agree with the scenario though, it seems very unlikely for a zombie apocalypse to proceed, unless it's like that 12 second (and no less) zombie conversion in World War Z. Any virus apocalypse is more likely to play out like the movie Contagion, which is chilling in its plausibility. That's more of a horror movie than any zombie flick. People don't need a virus to become lethal in their aggression. Desperation is enough.
I do have to admit that it was somewhat interesting to see World War Z (kind of) try to take a more scientific approach to the concept, logical flaws aside (and the fact that, as I understand it, the most it had in common from the original novel was probably the name), but it did strike me as a 'poor man's Contagion', which, while rather dry a lot of the time, was rather interesting to see how it unfolded.
As for the rabies angle, that's indeed not a terrifically good example, especially with a very obvious example of The Last of Us' mutant Cordyceps fungus giving a much more plausible angle: some kind of parasite that modifies the infected host's actions to attempt to further reproduce and spread. In the real world, that's what the Cordyceps fungus does to ants, and there's also the
Toxoplasma gondii parasite that alters infected rodents to be more prone to be caught by cats, which is where it primarily reproduces. And toxoplasma is also able to infect humans.
... Of course, there's
lots of reasons why a zombie apocalypse would quickly fail (zombies may as well be wild-animal chow, for example, as well as extreme heat or cold), but there you go.
