WoW plague teaches boffins about real epidemics

Nina Fefferman of Rutgers University in New Jersey, told hacks that discussions were underway with the game's maker Blizzard on how future updates might yield useful scientific data about viruses.

She said that as technology and biology becomes integrated in daily life a small step towards the interaction of virtual viruses and humans could become highly significant. Fefferman said that while it is possible to do the numbers about people during a plague outbreak, there were no ways to model how people will behave in a public crisis, she said.

Late 2005, Blizzard programmers introduced a highly contagious disease called "Corrupted Blood" into a newly created zone of the game's Byzantine environment.

Initially experienced players shrugged it off like a bad cold, and weaker ones were left with disabled avatars. However then some of those characters carrying the virus slipped back into the virtual world's populated cities, rapidly infecting their inhabitants.

Players abandoned domesticated animals fearing that their characters would get sick and these also spread the illness.

Programmers tried to set up quarantines, but they were ignored and in the end Blizzard shut down the servers and rebooted the system.

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