Epidemiologists play games to study plague, pestilence

SCIENTISTS are considering using the accidental spread of a "plague" in the online role playing game World of Warcraft in an attempt to correlate the response with real-life disease outbreaks.

While players online were obviously more playful about the whole event, few genuinely wanted to catch the virtual ailment.

This meant that while some players bolted like chickens in an attempt to flee the plague, others treated it as a fun in-game event that would probably be fixed soon enough and decided to have as much fun as possible.

Players would happily hang around town centres with no more purpose than infecting other players. Although in WoW players can immediately tell when they have been infected reality hasn't the same benefits. Fortunately, these players simulate people who don't know (or refuse to accept) that they are affected and become carriers for the ailment.

While players infected one another for fun, game staff tried desperately to keep control of the situation. This ranged from resurrecting dead players to trying to enforce quarantines on those still alive and carrying the plague. As in reality there were players who attempted to break the quarantine and went on to infect others rather than be condemned to death. Player response has been summarised as "remarkably realistic".

The program (All Things Considered) has quoted WoW's lead producer as saying that Blizzard wouldn't be against experimenting with the concept at some stage in the future. Players are already talking about long term effects surviving certain illnesses could have on characters and many are quite excited at the prospect. Regardless of the outcome this is one of the first times that science has studied gaming to interpolate results in reality, instead of the reverse. It always feels nice to give something back. µ

See Also
Typhoid Mary
Black Death
Epedemiology