Bugs and Drugs: Summary and Rating

I represent the last 109 of those 179,909 deaths.

         

Bugs and Drugs

United States

Independently developed in 1978 on PLATO educational system at the University of Illinois

Date Started: 4 November 2022

Date Ended: 18 November 2022

Total Hours: 7 (unfinished)

Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: 27

Ranking at Time of Posting: 265/483 (55%)

     

Summary:

 

Bugs and Drugs is the first known educational CRPG. Developed on the same educational system (PLATO) as most of the earliest CRPGs, it takes the game mechanisms of The Game of Dungeons (1975) and sets gameplay in a hospital, where the character (who starts as a medical student) wanders the halls and, in place of monsters, encounters a variety of diseases, conditions, and infections. In place of armor, the player has surgical masks, gloves, and other medical equipment. Nurses' stations, labs, lounges, and libraries provide information and succor. Surviving the game requires the player to know the best antibiotic or other therapy to apply to a specific disease. Other encounters test the player's knowledge of treatments, definitions, and history. While it is possible for a non-medical student or professional to navigate the game through experimentation, luck, and Google, long-term success is difficult without the specialized knowledge the game is meant to test.

    

*****

   

I got no takers on my suggestions to make Bugs and Drugs a group project, so I gave it another few hours on my own. My basic strategy was to lurk around the entrance, since escaping to the menu restores your hit points and medications. Every time I encountered a bug, I checked my spreadsheet to see if I'd already worked out the best treatment, then applied that. If I didn't have it logged in my spreadsheet, but I had a formulary (which was rare), I used that to determine the best treatment and logged it. Otherwise, if the bug was obviously related to tuberculosis (i.e., it had "TB" in the name), I tried "TB Therapy." If it was obviously a virus (e.g., influenza), I tried "Viral Therapy." Anything else, I tried high-dose penicillin. I logged successes and failures in a growing database.

        

I made it to "Med Student!"

     

TB therapy, viral therapy, and the occasional "mugger" all asked medical trivia questions. (I suppose "trivia" is the wrong word, since we're dealing with knowledge that saves people's lives, but you get the idea.) These I also logged in a spreadsheet, noting both correct and incorrect answers.

   

As I covered last time, it's not so easy to Google the best treatments for many of the infections offered, given that the game is over 40 years old, and some medications (particularly Amoxicillin and Doxycycline) were either not widely available or not widely prescribed. Also, you only have about 30 seconds to apply the right treatment. It was much easier to Google the answers to the trivia questions, as you have unlimited time to answer them.

   

You can also look up the answers to trivia questions in the library. Every time I had five library keys, I made my way there to log a few correct answers. However, it was a risky journey, and I often died trying to get to the library or get back from it. The most useful item in the game, I discovered, is a hormone shot, which automatically resurrects you when you die. Unfortunately, these are found only rarely.

        

I'm picturing two interns arguing over my corpse: "You're going to give him the shot." "No, you're going to give him the shot." "I ain't givin' him the shot!"

      

I managed to get one character up to Level 2 ("Med Student"), which I guess I'll have to regard as my own personal triumph. 

   

A GIMLET is kind of silly for this type of game, but I can't have a blank row in the spreadsheet, so let's give it a try:

   

• 3 points for the game world. It's unique, but also rather silly and unbelievable as a setting. I vacillated between 2 and 3 on this one and decided to be generous.

         

Level 6 of the hospital. Who would build a real hospital like this?

      

• 2 points for character creation and development. It's too bad that the creators didn't find a way to add "classes" to the game, such as specialists with bonuses against certain types of diseases. Character creation is otherwise rather basic, with only a few attributes to roll and reroll. I didn't experience enough development to determine whether it was rewarding, but my Level 2 character didn't seem any stronger than my Level 1.

• 0 points for no NPCs as such.

• 5 points for encounters. The game does best here. Not only are its "monsters" highly original (compared to other CRPGs) but you get all manner of other random encounters that offer a variety of rewards and punishments. There are no "role-playing" options, exactly, but the encounters do test your medical knowledge.

        

Trying to provide viral therapy.

       

• 3 points for combat. I want to give more credit for originality, but I already applied that to "encounters." Combat is rather binary: you either know the right treatment or you don't. There are a few other variables, such as the resistance level, to consider, and a whole set of "options" that I didn't have a chance to explore because you have to purchase them.

• 3 points for equipment. In addition to the defensive items that you can wear, I liked the other variety of finds: defenses, white blood cells, library keys, formularies, level maps, and the ability to discern resistance levels, among others.

• 5 points for the economy. I didn't use it much, but there are quite a number of things you can buy in the lounge, pharmacy, and store. The store sells hormones (which resurrect you when you die), so the economy definitely never runs out of utility.

• 2 points for a main quest.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I find the PLATO graphics extremely functional, though of course not immersive. There is no sound. The keyboard interface works well, and the game usually does a good job of indicating your options on screen at any given time.

• 1 point for gameplay. I look for nonlinearity, replayability, moderate-hard difficulty, and a sensible length in this category, and I can't really see any of them here except a little replayability.

   

That gives us a subtotal of 26, but I'm going to award a bonus point for accomplishing something that few RPGs of its era managed to accomplish: ensuring that the time students spent playing games wasn't completely wasted. That gives us a final score of 27, much higher than the 18 I gave to The Game of Dungeons. That surprised me at first, but Bugs really does offer a lot more. The only reason I'd play Dungeons over this is that Dungeons doesn't require me to spend so much time frantically Googling "staphylococcus" and usually getting the spelling wrong.

         

This was the only question whose answer I already knew.

     

There's a part of me that wants to keep building my database and to get a character to retirement, then pull a Frank Abagnale and try to pass the USMLE with my accumulated knowledge. I'm not sure it's really even possible to win, though. Only 83 people have done it since 1979, out of over 400,000 created characters. As far as I can tell, the leaderboard has never been cleared.

    

In any event, I can't keep letting myself get distracted by these incredibly long games if I'm ever going to get out of the early 1990s. I'm glad I got to at least cover it. Maybe someday, Think2, The Pits of Baradur, and M199h will resurface in the same way.

    

Related Entries: See my entry on The Game of Dungeons for the source of Bugs and Drugs' mechanics. A year later, a game called Medical Center, which was probably inspired in part by Bugs, premiered on PLATO.