World of Warcraft

WoW-a.k.a. World of Warcraft, is an online epidemic…really- a plague of the almost real kind. This reminded me on some of posts about Second Life and disabilities. (I must catch up with Fez…)

Forget WoW gold or World of Warcraft power leveling let’s talk “fantasy plagues”. According to a study released today a World of Warcraft plague that accidentally hit epidemic proportions and this has led scientists to believe that virtual worlds, like the venerable (circa 2004) World of Warcraft, could be great petri dishes for studying the propagation of plagues.

Would you like some malaria, ebola or a new killer strain of some mega-virus with for your Level 60 Mage? Yum.

Sounds kind of kooky but apparently discussions are underway between California-based, Blizzard (a division of Vivendi) and researchers on how the game might yield useful scientific data.

Corrupted Blood

“As technology and biology become more heavily integrated in daily life, this small step towards the interaction of virtual viruses and humans could become highly significant,” she said.

The unlikely path to a collaboration between hard science and hard-core gaming began in late 2005, when Blizzard programmers introduced a highly contagious disease — dubbed “Corrupted Blood” — into a newly created zone of the game’s Byzantine environment.

World of Warcraft is a “multiplayer online role-playing game” in which players — numbering in the tens, or hundreds of thousands — use computer-controlled avatars to fight battles, form alliances, and dialogue simultaneously on the Internet.

At first the “patch”, as new elements such as the disease are called, worked as expected: experienced players shrugged it off like a bad cold, and weaker ones were left with disabled avatars.

But then things spun out of control. As in reality, some of those carrying the virus slipped back into the virtual world’s densely populated cities, rapidly infecting their defenseless inhabitants.

The disease also spread — much like real influenza or the plague — via domesticated animals abandoned by players for fear of infecting their avatars, leaving the sickened pets to roam freely…

Blizzard programmers tried to set up quarantines to clean up the plague, but this attempt was ignored and in the end they had to resort to the virtual fail safe- they shut down the servers and rebooted the entire system. If only the bubonic plague has been that easy.

Apparently this was the first time a “virtual disease” infected a human (via an avatar- so disease by proxy) in a manner that resembled real world events- and being gamers the researchers were able to cross-pollinate the observation into their own field- which relies almost exclusively on computer simulations and mathematical models to forecast pandemics. What excited them is the chance to study people and how players might behave with the plague- and lots of free WoW time perhaps…

Will they report to the quarantine?
Will some social engineer comrades and sell bogus “cures”
Will they become less cooperative if they are genuinely worried?
What would happen with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of infected people?

I wonder if infected players are worth less in the grey market chop shops???

Game not Science

Sure it is easy to toss this around and it is hardly “scientific”. Afterall this is only a game, but as any verteran AD&D player or DM worth their salt will tell you- people become extremely attached to their characters or, in the case of World of Warcraft, their avatars- they literally become their alter egos. WoW players, or perhaps Second Life participants, of even Club Penguin kids would make interesting models for study because have a vested interest in the character’s longevity and well being.

I could imagine this being discussed…

The researchers are working on a proposal for a new patch that would be a “compromise between what gamers would most enjoy and what would be most scientifically useful,” she said.

I love it- a compromise between infecting your WoW character and bettering science. I am sure there are some enterprising ARG creators, and I look for ARGs to emerge even bigger and brighter in the future and cross all kinds of diverse terrain, who are excited at the future. I wonder if this was remotely thought about at Defining ARGs and the Future of ARG , Developing an ARG , during ARGN. I really wish I had made it to the last SXSW. Oh well- we have enterprising folks like Marty and Joe happy to use a scripting language for less than worthwhile purposes.

Seriously- imagine if your next MMPOG received funding from the CDC! Finally your tax dollars at work and you get to have fun…I think.

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