A Tufts university researcher wants to use an incident in “World of Warcraft” to learn about how a pandemic might spread and people might react to it.

In the fall of 2005, Blizzard Entertainment, which created and operates “World of Warcraft”, introduced a new area into the game and in the area, a new villain who could infect players with a curse called “Corrupted Blood”, which caused a great deal of damage to the player over a short period of time, usually killing the player in short order. A very unusual effect of Corrupted Blood was that it could infect others standing near players who were afflicted by it. Leaving the area would clear the curse, but it turned out there was an accidental vector for it to travel outside of the new area, via pets belonging to Hunter characters. So, while the creators of World of Warcraft had meant for it to be contained in only the new area they’d added, it spread across the world and through the major cities. Players started avoiding the major cities and groups of other players in an attempt to stay clear of the curse.

The incident was significant enough that it was reported by news services that generally would have nothing to say about computer gaming or World of Warcraft.

Eventually Blizzard stopped the epidemic by making a change to the way Corrupted Blood operated, so that it could no longer spread in the same manner. I regret that I missed the whole thing; my World of Warcraft character was low level and I wasn’t playing much at the time. I would have loved to have seen what it was like in the big cities with this “virus” spreading rapidly and players dying quickly.

Some of the elements of World of Warcraft that might help in modeling real-world disease transmission include the ability to travel across the world quickly, in-game pets which were afflicted with and carried the disease as well, cities full of players/people, and people behaving stupidly in response to threats.

Via: Online Gamers’ World Reveals Unexpected Secrets of Next Epidemic (TreeHugger)

Via: Corrupted Blood in Wikipedia
[tags]world of warcraft, corrupted blood, tufts, pandemic, epidemic[/tags]

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