In 2005, there was a plague. It started
inadvertently, as
most do, but spread rapidly, resulting in many deaths.
Officials scrambled to find a solution. Eventually
it was contained.
The plague was caused by a miscoded spell (
href="http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/gadgets/index.blog?entry_id=1230071">Corrupted
Blood), in the massively-multiplayer
online role-playing game (
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMORPG" rel="tag">MMORPG),
href="http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/index.xml">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
href="http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473309907702128/abstract">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.
href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6951918.stm">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
href="http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/gadgets/index.blog?entry_id=1230071">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.
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