Real Life Researchers Study ‘Corrupted Blood’ Virus Plague in World of Warcraft
According to Nina Fefferman of Princeton University in a telephone interview, who worked on the report with her (then) student Eric Lofgren, “It really looked quite a bit like a real disease,”.The virus outbreak ‘Corrupted Blood’ was an accidental consequence of a software challenge added to the World of Warcraft game in 2005 and was introduced by maker Blizzard Entertainment Inc. as an extra challenge to high-level players. But, just as a real virus might spread, it was accidentally carried out of its virtual containment area.
“Soon, the disease had spread to the densely populated capital cities of the fantasy world, causing high rates of mortality and, much more importantly, the social chaos that comes from a large-scale outbreak of deadly disease,” Ms Fefferman and Mr Lofgren wrote.
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“No one have ever looked at what would happen when people who are not in a quarantine zone get in and then leave.”
Fefferman will now incorporate such behaviour into her scenarios, and is working with Blizzard to model disease outbreaks in other popular games.
“With very large numbers of players (currently 6.5 million for World of Warcraft), these games provide a population where controlled outbreak simulations may be done seamlessly within the player experience,” she wrote.
Ms Fefferman noted that Ran Balicer of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel came to a similar conclusion in a paper published in the journal Epidemiology in March.
