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Study of Disease in the game world?; FOUND ON ARS TECHNICA, NOOB.
Topic Started: Aug 22 2007, 08:32 PM (389 Views)
LordIllidan
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Level 86 Black Mage
I found this on Ars Technica. I thought it was pretty interesting:

Quote:
 
Around this time two years ago, a strange phenomenon struck the virtual inhabitants of World of Warcraft. A disease designed to be limited to areas accessed by high-level characters managed to make it back to the cities of that virtual world, where it devastated their populations. At the time, Ars' Jeremy Reimer noted, "it would be even more interesting if epidemiologists in the real world found that this event was worthy of studying as a kind of controlled experiment in disease propagation." The epidemiologists have noticed, and there may be more of these events on the way for WoW players.

There were a number of features in the virtual outbreak that actually mimicked the spread of and response to real-world epidemics. A key feature was that the disease could be carried by the game's "pets," the virtual equivalent of domesticated animals; this behavior is shared by SARS and avian flu, among other diseases. The game's teleportation acted like air travel in allowing the disease to rapidly go "global." The humans controlling the players also mimicked the behavior of real populations during historical epidemics. As the populations of cities were wiped out by the disease, surviving players began avoiding them, and any large groups of players became scarce in the surrounding countryside.

It took only six months for the first academic analysis of the outbreak to appear in the journal Epidemiology. The article highlighted the advantages of the WoW incident, comparing it favorably to existing computer models that "are limited in their potential to account for changes in human behaviors during epidemics." At the same time, it recognized that virtual characters might not accurately track all normal human behaviors.

On balance, the analysis in Epidemiology felt that virtual worlds might provide a useful supplement to traditional models of disease spread, and suggested working with game programmers to test a variety of disease conditions. "Multiplayer online role-playing games may even be useful as a testing ground for hypotheses about infectious disease dissemination," the author said, "Game programmers could allow characters to be inflicted by various infectious diseases, some of which may not be visible to the player, and track the dissemination patterns of the disease in specific subpopulations." It looks like something of the sort is in the works. A report from the Agence France-Presse indicates that Nina Fefferman, a researcher from Tufts University, is currently negotiating with Blizzard about running epidemiological tests in WoW.

Although this is quite intriguing from a scientific standpoint, it's not clear whether gamers will come out the winners in these experiments. If the primary advantage of a virtual game environment is the fact that real human behavior emerges, then modeling diseases that are not visible to the players appears to be besides the point. Players have to be aware of the disease, and it has to be disruptive enough to induce them to change behavior for such experiments to yield valuable data. Players were apparently fascinated by the accidental WoW plague, but it's doubtful they'll respond as positively to a second one, especially if it is inserted into their world intentionally.
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Death_Blade_182
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Ex-emo Extraordinaire
I already read that on wikipedia, i think the disease was called "corrupted blood" and it was used by "hakkar the soulflayer" or something like that

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Sabby
Unregistered

Wow, Ive never heard of this. It must of happened a long time ago ('bout 3 years or more).
And thats not a big deal for us priests and paladins (I'm a priest :D)

/cast abolish disease

problem solved lmfao.
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Beeg
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SIMON, TAKE IT!
actualy.. it was in my local paper jsut last week.
I was wondering what the spell did, because if it killed off the most of the gamming community, then i would say it would make lots of people angry..
what did it actualy do besides spread?
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Sabby
Unregistered

Blood of Hakkar did like X damage ever Y seconds. And if you were standing neat someone, they got it to. When I've run Zul'Gurrub (the dungeon that this debuff is from) I dont think it lasts any longer than 15 seconds or so. But If someone was to quickly portal to a populated city like Ironforge, that thing would spread like wildfire amongst other players.
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Death_Blade_182
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Ex-emo Extraordinaire
details here

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Sabby
Unregistered

interesting. I joined the game after Zul'Gurrub was introduced so I guess I missed all this fun. :\
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Death_Blade_182
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Ex-emo Extraordinaire
I wish i was there when it happened so i could spread the disease >_>

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Lunaris
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i read about that!
its name was courrupted blood and it killed MANY PLAYERS...
it sucked for me as a lvl 5 at the time
the other name for it was the black death!
go to this website to see REALLY CUTE biological virus plushies (im not advertising) (i just think they are adorable) (and black death is one of them)
My avatar is badass.
also
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