Covid changed our appetite for zombies

The year was in 2013, and the edition of the hot-expected Videogress Zombi-Apocalypse was on the horizon.

Play, called The last of usThey invited the players to explore what seemed an imaginative scenario at the time: a world ravaged by a pandemia in which pathogen kills millions of people.

Unlike many apocalypse fiction, the responsible pathogen was not a bacterium or a virus, but a mushroom called Cordyceps that infects people and takes over their brain.

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Writers in Game Studio Nauighty Dog based in Santa Monica, California were inspired by real fungi – especially OpphioCordyceps one -sidedknown as the Zombi-Ant mushroom. Fungus infects insects and releases chemicals in animal brains to change their behavior. On the eve of the game releasing, Nauighty Dog turned to scientists, including the environmental organic David Hughes, a zombie-an-and-called mushroom expert (he called it by his wife), to ask questions about fungal and pandemic sciences that inspired the story. Hughes, who has been at the University of Pennsylvania at the University Park State University, has since moved to study climate change and food safety.

The last of us He created the continuation of the game 2020. And a critically recognized television show, and the second season that ends on May 25 at HBO.

Hughes talked Nature He changed his appetite for zombies about his experience of playing about the game and why Coid-19.

What was your involvement in the game?

Nauighty Dog Studios asked me to have a few other people who were observed in this space, including psychologists, talking about whether we could have a global pandemic. Of course, in the emergency period, we all learned that the answer was yes.

They asked us to go around Europe and make a series of lectures to eliminate criticism and support the idea that infections jumping from one species to another – zoonotic infections – are not only possible, but are actually a prevailing mechanism that people infected with new parasites that cause the disease. I was fortunate to go to the studio and see the art that was involved, met the team and voice actors from the video game.

What did you do from science in the game?

I was really impressed by how many writers of the game went into science about it and they started to understand things like mushrooms and mucus molds, and just trying to think about the ways these organisms do their jobs. They really took it themselves and built those elements in the game.

I think even the molds for ordering mail are, so they could just leave it on Petra’s meal and inspect. And you see that throughout the game. And now they are the TV program, in UNTS, they have those mucus balls. The writers were Geeky, and the understanding of the fungus was not complex, so they did their best.

Did you play games?

I tried and I failed! I am just a typical hopeless scientist.

Is the idea of ​​a pandemia Cordyceps realistic?

It is not unrealistic that fungi can infect humans if they come from animals. It is unrealistic to think that they could cause changes in behavior in humans. The writers took freedom. They had different stages about how the infection changes over time. That’s all imaginative, of course.

Watching the second season of the TV show, it was interesting that they had this communication nature of a dispute or a fungal hife. This is interesting because we know that the fungi are associated with over many kilometers – for example, mycorrhizal mushrooms, which are located under the root systems on the trees, do so effectively.