Pandemic, Globalization, and the Body Politic

One friend of mine, who regularly supplies me with the most popular images, articles, and memes of the Internet, recently sent me a link to a game called Pandemic. This game caught my attention not because of its graphics or playability, but because of its controversial nature in a world that is preoccupied with terrorism and international relations.
The game itself is simple, with the player acting as an infectious disease with the goal of evolving and infecting as many people as possible. The player controls factors such as climate viability, drug resistance, and visibility of symptoms. In turn, the modifications that the player makes influence how each country's government reacts to the disease.
Government regulations such as the closing of schools and airports, or the enforcement of curfews show how the game represents the body politic. The government regulations in the game are made to mirror present-day governments' responses to the public's paranoia. In a world where the media portrays chemical warfare and biological terrorism as imminent threats, governments often respond by having emergency procedures in place. These procedures serve as ways to regulate the individual as well as a nation's collective body. The regulation of bodies is a right that is often given over to the government in today's world in order to assuage the public's fear of physical attack and to prevent disorder (disorderly bodies, bodies not in their "correct" state or location).
The idea of the collective body becomes important in this game with the governments' option to close their borders. In a world where globalization allows for money, conversations, jobs, etc. to transcend the physical borders between countries, one may wonder how effective borders will be in the event of a pandemic. According to the game, disease can still spread whether or not international borders are closed, by way of ships, airplanes, animals, even air. By closing its borders, a country seeks to protect its collective body, thus creating a political strategy for combating the pandemic, as if the disease could be repelled by the political ideology of a country, regardless of its close proximity to other infected countries.
This view of the body politic reminded me of the people Emily Martin interviewed in her article, The End of the Body?1 She remarks that "The self has retreated inside the body, is a witness to itself, a tiny figure in a cosmic landscape, which is the body" (Martin 1992:125). With a new understanding of immunology comes a new understanding of the individual body. While the body of an individual occupies a specific physical place, that individual's immune system is part of a vast web which is connected to every pathogen and every other immune system in the world. The government regulations in the game show how the regulation of the political body has expanded over the years to include both the regulation of the tangible physical body and the seemingly intangible immune system.
The appeal of Pandemic lies with its ability to play into people's fears of increasing globalization, government regulation, and bio-terrorism. Some may find this game to be in bad taste because it uses the idea of a serious pandemic to entertain, in the same way that some comedians are considered to have bad taste because of their jokes concerning serious issues such as racism or sexism. While the objective of the game may be controversial, Pandemic allows players to understand and control their fears rather than being a victim of terror. The fact that this game even exists shows that the public is preoccupied with the threat of global disaster and how to prevent it. Its popularity speaks for its relevance in today's understanding of the body politic.

1. Martin, Emily. 1992. The end of the body?. American Ethnologist 19(1):121-140.