World of Warcraft ‘Disease Model’
August 21st, 2007Via: BBC:
An outbreak of a deadly disease in a virtual world can offer insights into real life epidemics, scientists suggest.
The “corrupted blood” disease spread rapidly within the popular online World of Warcraft game, killing off thousands of players in an uncontrolled plague.
The infection raged, wreaking social chaos, despite quarantine measures.
The experience provides essential clues to how people behave in such crises, Lancet Infectious Diseases reports.
In the game, there was a real diversity of response from the players to the threat of infection, similar to those seen in real life.
The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously
Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine
Some acted selflessly, rushing to the aid of other characters even though that meant they risked infection themselves.
Others fled infected cities in an attempt to save themselves.
And some who were sick made it their mission to deliberately infect others.
Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: “Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour.
“The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game.”
Related: Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation
Check out a lesser-known virtual world called “There”. I forget why this game caught my eye, but I screwed around with it for a few days years ago, and from what I could gather the game is directly modeled from American consumerism. The goal is literally to buy things and fit in.
From an official press release by the production company (Makena Technologies) in 2003:
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http://www.there.com/pressBusiness2_030103.html
“Tellingly, There’s first bankable revenues are likely to come from a source that went almost completely forgotten during the boom years but was once tech’s most reliable wellspring of funding: the Department of Defense. The U.S. military has a long history of expertise in the creation of simulated environments, but since 9/11 the Pentagon has looked for ways to fill those environments with the bustling crowds that terrorist and other “asymmetric” threats tend to emerge from. Designed precisely with crowds in mind, There turns out to be far ahead of any multiuser world the Defense Department has cooked up internally. “Even though the military has awesome simulation capabilities, as you might imagine, the idea of these large-scale persistent worlds — that is not an approach they had taken,” says Robert Gehorsam, There’s VP for strategic initiatives, who expects to sign a contract imminently to build a “virtual Afghanistan” for the Defense Department.”