HeadWillCollapse

If you could level one complaint at classic medical simulation “Life and Death 2″ other than the general headaches caused when aging games meet modern hardware, it would be at the lack of multi-player support. It’s a grand oversight considering the number of people you’d normally find lending a helping hand in the theatre of operations that is the operating theatre. LD2 lays all the tasks of the O.R. soundly at a single player’s feet and beyond that forces the single player to run the tests, examine the patient and trudge through the histories.

Clearly this is more responsibility than should be placed on the head of a single sixty-hour-week-working individual. It’s time to put an end to it. In a recent revisit to the game and with the sort of knowledge that can only be gained from episodes of St. Elsewhere, Casualty and their ilk; I have devised a multi-player version of LD2 that’ll have the entire family botching operations, exceeding budgets and spreading methicillin resistant infection for hours on end.

“How?” I hear you ask. Simple, by fusing the computer game world of LD2 with the real world of television drama. Originally I had thought of basing the idea on preposterous accident & emergency dramatisation “ER”, but after careful consideration and having had it pointed out that “ER” already has its own crappy spin-off game I settled on this one:

House M.D.’s Life and Death 2

Catchy, non? The requirements for this are simple: One PC, a copy of “Life and Death 2″, a medical dictionary, up to four players and optionally a while-board and marker pens. The players will firstly adopt the characters of House’s diagnostic team, including one playing House himself. To aid getting into character I suggest the person playing “Cameron” be female; the one playing “Foreman” be ready to take every statement the others make as a racial slur; the one playing “Chase” to try and aspire to the heights of Chase’s father and the one playing House to drop some Vicadin and wear my specially crafted “House Head ™”.

In the roles of the diagnostic team, the players will set out to cure patients as a single, well oiled medical machine. The roles in-game should reflect those on-screen, that is:

1. “House” is only involved until diagnosis is complete, should the patient need surgery he’s no longer “House’s” problem.
2. “House” should on no account examine the patient, patient exams should be done only by “Cameron” or “Chase”.
3. Patient histories should be read aloud to “House” by “Cameron”.
4. Though House should examine the MRI/CAT scan/Angiogram results, he should never switch the machines on himself. He should leave this to either “Cameron” or “Chase”.
5. While diagnosing the patient, the character playing “House” should write all the symptoms up on the white-board (if available). The person playing “Foreman” should have been paying attention throughout the discussion thus far and should be able to offer up several possible causes for the symptoms to House, who will ultimately make the final call.
6. As a counterpoint to “Foreman” the person playing “Chase” should shout out random conditions from the medical dictionary throughout the diagnosis. They should be summarily ignored.
7. Once diagnosis is complete, if no surgery is required, “House” should dispense the treatment.
8. If surgery is required, “House” can go and grab some pain relief while “Chase” and “Foreman” step up to the plate.
9. “Foreman” is the neurologist here, so he gets the knife and gets to do the chopping. Seeing as only one person can use the mouse at a time (due to the hugely limiting way in which physics constrains the universe), “Chase’s” job will be too keep an eye on all the other crazy things happening on-screen such as the patient’s heart rate, oxygen sats and ever swelling piss-bag.

Each of the failure conditions places the blame squarely on a particular team member’s shoulders:

1. An allergic reaction or exciting magnet/pacemaker death are clearly “Cameron’s” fault, she took the history and was going to switch on the machines.
2. If the diagnosis was wrong it’s clearly “House’s” fault, should this happen the current “House” will NEVER be allowed to play the character again.
3. A death during surgery not directly caused by the person operating is “Chase’s” failing, bad Kennedy!
4. Drilling into the patient’s brain/letting them bleed to death/accidentally lobotomising them results in us pointing the finger at “Foreman” and yes; we’d still be pointing the finger of blame if you were white.

2 points each for saving a patient, 1 point deducted from the guilty party when a patient is lost. Bonus points can be awarded at any time for demonstrating character traits such as slamming your cane down on a metallic surface, sobbing uncontrollably, asking if people are judging you for your criminal past or using the word “billabong” in a coherent sentence.

Life and Death images appear courtesy of abandonia.com.

House appears courtesy of Fox.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Pause for thought. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.