A noninfected can see a zombie and recognize that it is the zombified version of some "known" agent.
There's two goals with the communication:
- the first is that it opens up a lot of fun if you have pluggable behavior for noninfected (EG: LIARS!)
- the second is that it forces you to deal with interval arithmetic (or an equivalent scheme)
Additionally, I'm looking for something that besides being cool, will be sort of useful.
There's a handful of companies that essentially do more in-depth versions of these things at like the level of "h1n1 comes to small town america; what emergent behavior patterns do we see in our model" (names escaping me sorry).
There's also a lot of boring-ish economics sims that've been done (names escaping me also, sorry).
To make it fun for the end-user you'd have to "borrow" tilesets from a videogame I think.
You're right though: it's more fun for the person making it than a casual observer.