I wanted to do a bit of research on malaria (a disease I am particularly interested in, for both scientific and personal reasons), but before I hit the online journals, I did a quick Google search. High on the list was a page from the Nobel Prize website - stick me with some quick info, I thought. But when I got there, I was quite bemused, somewhat amused, and slightly disturbed to find: malaria games. Yep, have fun flying around as a mosquito looking for unsuspecting humans, and drain them of 10 microlitres of blood! Or, be a sneaky malaria parasite, infect someone, then multiply multiply multiply! If you're fast enough, you can make the high score!
How...morbidly amusing?
Ok, to their credit they do sneak in a ton of useful info about the disease within the game, which you might otherwise have scorned to read. The games are pretty in the usual Flash sort of way, and you actually get quizzed on what you learn. So I gradually lost some of my initial feelings of discomfort when I acknowledged the educational aspect of it. I still however, couldn't help feeling bemused throughout, though some things were quite funny. Like hearing the mosquito buzz for the first time (they captured that annoying noise a little too well for my liking). Or the karate-slap and ensuing "UHH!" when your poor parasite was engulfed by a macrophage :)
So if you're feeling decidedly vampirish or pathogenic, give it a go.
http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/medicine/malaria/