August 21, 2007
Scientists studying the possibiliy of pandemic disease have turned to an unusual test group: World of Warcraft players.As reported by Reuters, researchers Nina Fefferman and Eric Lofgren of Princeton University are looking into the September, 2005 outbreak of Corrupted Blood within WoW.
Corrupted Blood was a debuff cast by a high-level boss which could be spread from one character to another if the characters were too close together. It could also be spread to pets. Within a short time it had been carried out of the boss instance and into the larger WoW cities where it proved devastating to lower-level characters. Said Fefferman:
It really looked quite a bit like a real disease... Someone thinks, 'I'll just get close and get a quick look and it won't affect me.'
Now that it has been pointed out to us, it is clear that it is going to be happening. There have been a lot of studies that looked at compliance with public health measures. But they have always been along the lines of what would happen if we put people into a quarantine zone -- will they stay? No one have ever looked at what would happen when people who are not in a quarantine zone get in and then leave.
With very large numbers of players (currently 6.5 million for World of Warcraft), these games provide a population where controlled outbreak simulations may be done seamlessly within the player experience.
The Corrupted Blood experience within WoW is both fascinating and fun to study. But the real-world possibilities are frightening. According to Reuters:
Experts agree the world is overdue for a pandemic of some sort of disease. The current No. 1 suspect is the H5N1 avian influenza virus, which has killed 194 out of 321 people infected since 2003.
Comments
Re: WoW Outbreak Studied by Pandemic Researchers
yea this happned like september 2005... and most of these comments are in 2007, soo the EQ thing was about the same time. and yea this was an accident not a planned out thing.. Something simmilair happened like this, where a warlock or hunter would get a debuff. somthing like a bomb, anyway when the timer ran out it would BLOW THE FUCK UP and damage everyone around... theres a video of a gnome lock doing this in IF auction house brfore AH spread to other cities. but it would be pretty sweet if they start doing stuff like that now in Wrath of the lich king.. im getting bored of the game and stuff like this would spice things up.
Blog coment
Thanx For sharing such a beautiful resource. I really appreciate it..
Instead of actually killing the characters, just have a tracking tag to see how one person can spread the diseases if uncontained. Also there can be a virtual containment that contain the tag when a character enter an area and if the character leave, the tag will stay and the character will never be effected by that tag. In the research model the tag staying act as if it kill the character in the contain area (with out actually killing him/her).
It would be a great model for spreading decease, but not actually the genetic of a disease.
Also, there could be some immunity for certain player of a certain level or cast, and do the research for with the tag method.
There also could be a special server to encourage people to join the research for a month or so. And make sure that characters' stat in that server won't change for the time and that server. Player who died first can respond as people who place quarantine, and simulate how effective different way are.
With all this, why don't they make a MMO for the researcher, and have people from the scientific community and collage volunteer to join. They can call it Pandemic Online.
But think about it for a minute. There's a diverse range of personalities and ages, although not true to reality. It wasn't confined to a single country. Unlike other virtual simulations, it has real people controlling the population. There was no thought at the time of it being a study, so that didn't affect the actions of the population at all. And it wasn't an AI where we could control and predict actions.
Obviously it's not perfect. It's not completely true to life. Based on my reasons though, I'd say it's something to add to the files.
-Mike Schwinger
Although maybe not WoW, where people would be up in arms about having their characters destroyed as part of an experiment. These players get angry when their favourite class has a stat drop.
@Minshi
Thats a scary thought, because it would happen, everyone knows that. think about the black plague, millions of people, excusing their sickness, spreading it, unknowingly.
Except, in todays day and age, it would happen so much faster, it could spread from Africa to the rest of the world in weeks, days, if left uncontained.
clever
"I highly doubt that if there was an outbreak of Avian Flu, a bunch of asshats would burst into a retirement home or maternity ward and spread it around cause it was funny."
Your right, I can not see that. However, I could see a sick nurse who is ignoring her sickness going in, or a panicked mother. As for the retirement home, a son going to take his father away from the city in a panic while sick, or simply going as part of his weekly visits not thinking about the fact.
I guess that is another big thing, you know exactly what you have in the game, but in the real life, you may dismiss it as any lessor sickness or illness, or continue on your routines without thinking.
It may be that taking such "life-like" models, such as disease spreading as being "serious study" might have just occured to someone. When it happened in the Everquest 2 situation, it probably didn't come to anyone's mind that this might be an interesting way to study, even at a low level, the social effects of disease spreading. It may not be very scientific regarding the disease itself, but the social aspects are quite interesting.
Nightwng2000
NW2K Software
I highly doubt that if there was an outbreak of Avian Flu, a bunch of asshats would burst into a retirement home or maternity ward and spread it around cause it was funny.
I don't think behaviour in a game can really correlate with real life on this kind of issue.
In-game response: wow, cool - let's see how many people we can kill!
I'd very much hope the real life response would not be that...
(first?)
It went something like, top tier guild beats Hakkar, realizes they still have AIDS, warps to capital, infects anyone nearby, who in turn die, spread the disease to a high level NPC who can't die from it, who in turn gives it to the entire city by virtue of noobs running around.
It's not a good model, cause you don't really get resists against corrupted blood, and a cure constitutes a patch to change it from 'allies' to 'raid members'.
Now seed of corruption, that would make for a good test.
We can NEVER have a hypothetical model that's perfect. No matter WHAT we do, there's always an element of people knowing it's fake. And there are always unpredictable actions and circumstances. All we can do is study anything relevant and prepare as best we can.
-Mike Schwinger
"No one have ever looked at what would happen when people who are not in a quarantine zone get in and then leave."
Haven't any of these people watched any zombie films???
"not all humans are as intelligent as we wish"
IQ 100 is MEDIAN.
And altruism in not exactly being held as a high cultural value in most cultures around the world. Airline regulations won't let me carry a nail clipper, but I can go between continents with a high fever.
To use WoW properly, there would have to be a significant gameplay negative associated with contaminating others or the 'asshats' would certainly run wild for the hell of it.
It would have been cool if blizzard had put out a solution for players, such as healing totems or other player deployed fixes. That would have been much more interesting and engaging than a magic fix via server shutdown.
That would make for an interesting experiment!
for the record that wasnt meant to come out as harsh as it sounded
This happened in WoW like two years ago as well, but it was not a quest or in game event. It was an accidental pandemic. Far more interesting.