World of Warcraft-A Pandemic Lab?

[utvolpj]

Read this and thought it was an interesting idea. Public health expert are looking at games to track the spread of disease.

Both papers document the path of an unexpectedly virulent virtual disease called "Corrupted Blood," which swept through World of Warcraft's online characters starting in September 2005. (The game's administrators introduced the disease as a challenge for some high-level players; they didn't expect it to break out of the caves and into the virtual world's cities and towns.) The disease then ravaged the player population — despite administrators' efforts to quarantine the infected — and gave World of Warcraft its first virtual-world pandemic.

A few features of World of Warcraft made the game's 2005 outbreak a surprisingly good simulation of a real-world epidemic, they suggest. Players could teleport from one virtual-world location to another (not unlike hopping a transcontinental flight in the real world) and players kept pets, which got infected, serving as reservoirs for the disease. In response, some players with healing powers then traveled to help heal the sick, just as medical staff would be dispatched during a real-life epidemic.

World of Warcraft: A Pandemic Lab? - TIME

Who says games are useless?

 

[SWIL]

whoa- that's crazy! The Blizzard team essentially created a computer "virus" and set it loose in the game- then couldn't control it?!

 

[g8terh8ter_eric]

I see a "made for TV" movie coming out soon. Uselss.

 

[Vol Mania 21]

hahaha that's great, i hope their characters died ahahahahahahah