The plague was caused by a miscoded spell (Corrupted Blood), in the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft. The people who died were not real people. Nonetheless, it may be that the behavior of these virtual people can teach us some things about what real people would do it in the event of a real pandemic.
Now, it has become a topic of formal study, as reported in Lancet Infectious Disease (registration required; subscription for full access). There is a summary on the BBC site for those who don't want to bother with subscriptions or registration.
Virtual game is a 'disease model'
Tuesday, 21 August 2007
An outbreak of a deadly disease in a virtual world can offer insights into real life epidemics, scientists suggest.
The "corrupted blood" disease spread rapidly within the popular online World of Warcraft game, killing off thousands of players in an uncontrolled plague.
The infection raged, wreaking social chaos, despite quarantine measures.
The experience provides essential clues to how people behave in such crises, Lancet Infectious Diseases reports...
Some people tried to be heroic, some altruistic, others deliberately spread the virtual infection. Some were amused:
One 14-year-old Orc told me openly of the incident: "Humans were dying left and right. We just laughed and laughed."
The problem the researchers are trying to solve is this: The best research designs are prospective, randomized, double-blind studies, but it is unethical do do epidemiological research that involves deliberate infections.
The thought is that, perhaps, virtual worlds could permit a kind of mathematical modeling, with an element of human behavior that is difficult to build into a mathematical construct.
Such a research design is fraught with problems, of course. It is likely that people's behavior is different when the risk is not real. Presumably, few people would "just laugh and laugh" in a real pandemic. Perhaps, though, it would be possible to adjust for this.
