The makers of ultra-popular computer game Minecraft are launching a pandemic-themed spin-off that aims to educate children about why they need to stay at home.

Although it’s ostensibly about avoiding zombies, Mojang’s Blockdown Simulator aims to show young people why social distancing is so important to mitigate the burden on health services during a disease outbreak.

The game, created by AKQA, is centred on a map in which a village is exposed to highly infectious zombie villagers and features a control tower and an underground hospital in which players can monitor and cure the infected.

There are three scenarios to choose from – free for all, quarantine and lockdown – but the effect is to see how quickly villagers can turn into zombies, how they need to recover and return back to society, and how keeping healthy villagers away from the sick makes a recovery manageable.

Players can act either as an observer or take a more active role as a nurse within a zombie intensive care unit, in which zombie villagers are splashed with a health potion. Only one zombie villager can occupy the facility at a time.

AKQA London senior creative Joseph Davies and creative Hugo Barne created Blockdown Simulator and are encouraging players who enjoy the map to share it in order to both spread awareness and help develop it further.

Barne said: "Blockdown Simulator will always be in ‘beta’. If you are a developer, modder, data scientist or just a tinkerer, please build upon, hack or even remake it. We would love to see it evolve into, or inspire, a more compelling tool."

Minecraft is the bestselling video game of all time, with more than 180 million copies sold across all platforms and more than 112 million monthly active players by 2019 (10 years after it launched).

Blockdown Simulator is available fo free and has been made to help the United Nations Development Programme and Heart17’s "#TomorrowTogether" campaign to target social-distancing messaging at young people.