CANBERRA, June 12 (Xinhua) -- A computer game depicting the deliberate spread of a killer flu strain is virtually an educational tool to teach the public how pandemics develop.

    Ian Bogost, founder of Killer Flu's developer Persuasive Games, was in Sydney on Friday to address a conference on ways of using interactive games for health, defense and public policy education.

    Bogost said the game's concept came from an idea that to truly engage users, the game should exploit people's rebellious natures and have them take on the role of the virus.

    "We settled very early on the idea of playing as the flu rather than as the human victim in order that the activity would be about mutation and spreading, rather than about trying to avoid the flu itself," he told Australian Associated Press.

    Created in September last year, before the outbreak of A/H1N1 flu, Killer Flu allows the player to take on the role of a virus, such as seasonal flu, pandemic flu or bird flu.

    The player then tries to spread the virus to as many people as possible in a limited amount of time through strategic contamination of places calculated to cause mass infection.

    The online game shows why people can get more than one sort of flu in a lifetime, and why vaccines need changing every year.

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