Gaming the Apocalypse in the Time of Antibiotic Resistance

Abstract

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been an increasing number of articles in the popular press on antibiotic resistance, a great many of which present the phenomenon in the science-fictional language of the “post-antibiotic apocalypse.” In an effort to increase public awareness, the Longitude Prize, funded by the United Kingdom’s National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA), created the mobile video game Superbugs in 2016. This essay shows how the mobile gaming medium responds to and performs the science fictionality of the antibiotic apocalypse in a way that has consequences for the history of science. Superbugs mediates a shift in the conceptual metaphor of a war between humans and bacteria to an interrelational model of coexistence. By defamiliarizing both the history and current representations of antibiotic resistance, the game gives us a unique way to reflect on the conditions that fostered this survival facility in the bacteria genome.