September 02, 2007
The Epidemiology of Virtual Worlds and Our Own
Will Li in The Situationist:
“Some acted selflessly … though that meant they risked infection themselves.
Others fled infected cities in an attempt to save themselves.
And some who were sick made it their mission to deliberately infect others.” BBC News.
Ebola? Influenza? The movie “28 Days Later?” . . . or “Corrupted Blood” Disease in World of Warcraft?
In September of 2005, Blizzard Entertainment added a dungeon to their extremely popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) World of Warcraft (WoW). This dungeon featured an enemy at the end who, when killed, could infect players with a curse which could instantly kill weaker characters and eventually kill stronger ones. But, as reported in another BBC News report, rather than being confined to those playing in the dungeon, the disease inadvertently spread, passing from player to player, carried by computer programmed characters (non-player characters or NPCs), even manifesting on several game servers.
Ultimately, it killed thousands of player characters (temporarily) and led to “reports from the disaster zones with some describing seeing “hundreds” of bodies lying in the virtual streets of the online towns and cities.”
The very human reactions of individuals confronted with “Corrupted Blood” disease has since prompted researchers at the Tufts University School of Medicine to look into the virtual disease (and possible others) as disease models which could lend insight into human behavior. The August 21, 2007 BBC News article is excerpted below.
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Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: “Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:54 PM | Permalink
Comments
It seems to me (a non-virtual being) that one primary motive for a gamers' existence in a virtual world is to live and experience things not attainable in the real world. Extremes are thus encouraged, i.e., there are always second chances. That doesn't seem a good set-up for real-life modeling. For such a scenario to be more educational, certain characteristics must be more real-life, such as the concept of the finality of death. To really see what humans would do, one would have to penalize the avatars definitively, e.g. "You're dead, gone, and you cannot return. And, furthermore, your human counterpart also no longer has rights in this world. Good-bye & farewell." That would be the only true way of mirroring a real-life situation.
Posted by: weed watcher | Sep 3, 2007 11:34:48 AM
What I want to know is how the players reacted based on their Warcraft "race and class". Did Dwarves differ in their response to the plague from say Night Elves? How did paladins respond when compared with mages?
Posted by: Pete Chapman | Sep 4, 2007 7:49:45 PM
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