Interesting article in The Times yesterday, about an epidemic in World of Warcraft.
Apparently back in September 2005 a super-villain, a flying serpent called Hakkar, was supposed to be doing battle with high level players.
_Hakkar, WoW baddie. Photo by Jemimus _
Unfortunately, a bug of some kind caused him to transmit a “corrupted blood” virus to humans and other creatures in the game, causing half the population to be infected. I think it was a serious curse – a quick Google search reveals lots of reports of “cities filled with corpses”. Some players managed to get immunity, but became carriers, and others actively tried to spread it. It spread like wildfire, affected players at all levels and all sorts of quarantine methods were put in place with varying degrees of success.
This is news now because it’s been written up for a paper being published in The Lancet next month. The authors have analysed the spread of the disease and individual players’ responses to it, with a view to forming strategies for dealing with epidemics in the real world – the theory being that this is a good model of the real world because the players have such an emotional investment in the game. The detailed records mean you can see exactly how the epidemic spread, and additionally look at how to keep the public informed: what level of information caused panic, etc etc.
Disclaimer: I really don’t know anything about WoW, so this is just what I read in the paper and might be totally innaccurate, but it seemed an interesting story to me – does this kind of thing happen a lot?
Here’s the full citation:
Eric T Lofgren and Nina H Fefferman: The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Volume 7, Issue 9, September 2007, Pages 625-629.
DOI:10.1016/S1473-3099(07)70212-8
I have to admit I checked the date on my Times yesterday to see if it was 1 April. Gives epidemiological modelling a whole new dimension (ha). Without having read the Lancet paper, I remain unconvinced that such an uncontrolled experiement could tell you much about how people (most of whom are not 14 year old boys) would react in a real situation.
Given that there’ve been economics papers on WoW economics I don’t see why this is such a farfetched idea.
The Economist has coverage too.