Virtual epidemics may hold scientific promise

When Erik Jacobson fell victim to a recent plague that ravaged the online game "World of Warcraft" and caused his character to squirt blood, he and other players laughed it off as a harmless bug that caused some temporary sickness.

The plague, which hit the virtual world in late September, quickly propagated, causing the temporary death of innumerable players and significant damage to large numbers of others. But it didn't have any lasting effect: Those hit by the disease were either healed or quickly reborn.

But to some scientists and educators, virtual reality outbreaks like the one that slammed "World of Warcraft" could prove a valuable tool for studying the spread of infectious diseases--as well as public response to them. The correlation between online and real-world behavior in the face of epidemics, they say, takes on heightened significance in the face of public-health threats like a potential avian flu pandemic.

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What's new:
Could witnessing players' behavior in online plagues help save real-world lives?

Bottom line:
Some say virtual online worlds--where players' economic and social behavior is often a microcosm of their real-world behavior--are a perfect place to compare real-world infectious diseases with those comprised only of digital ones and zeros.

More stories on virtual words

"Similar to a natural virus, (which) in its DNA has the information encoded about what it's going to do, in a virtual world, when you have an outbreak, you have a piece of code with instructions about what it's going to do," said Yasmin Kafai, an associate professor of learning and instruction at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

Kafai and her colleague, Nina Neulight, recently conducted an investigation into "students' understanding of a virtual infectious disease (Word document) in relation to their understanding of natural infectious diseases." To do so, they intentionally spread a disease called Whypox through the online children's game "Whyville."

To Kafai, virtual online worlds--where players' economic and social behavior is often a microcosm of their off-line behavior--are a perfect place to compare real-world infectious diseases with those comprised only of digital ones and zeros. Among other things, she explained, virtual environments can allow researchers to see how social ostracization occurs as a disease spreads and people try to avoid going near the infected.

In her report on the Whypox study, Kafai said that results were mixed. On the one hand, the virtual sickness "capitalized on students' knowledge of natural infectious disease through virtual symptoms." But she also noted that the children likely saw the spread of the disease as little more than something to watch rather than as an actual biological process to learn from.

In the case of WoW, while many players were instantly affected by the plague, others found they could avoid it by maintaining a distance from victims. At the same time, many players used healing spells to help the afflicted recover.

One WoW player, known as Valewalker, told CNET News.com that the effects of the plague looked like a scene from a Steven Spielberg movie.

"Someone teleports into town with the effect of the disease on them," Valewalker said. "It was like dominos watching the plague itself hop from person to person within personal space of each other. And next thing I saw was many players dead left and right in seconds."

Patrick Bowman, a production coordinator at Activision (not the maker of WoW) and an avid WoW player who fell victim to the plague, saw similar scenes, and like many others, decided it would be amusing to see if he could intentionally spread the disease.

"I...saw hundreds of dead bodies and bones around the area," Bowman said. "I realized that now it was actually spreading from person to person so I ran over to the Fly Point and affected everyone around it."

WoW is the most successful massively multiplayer online game in U.S. history, partly due to remarkable player loyalty, as well as what many say is the best implementation of game play, graphics, user interface and story line of any online game.

Jacobson explained that the disease was not originally supposed to spread, but was intended as a way to inflict temporary damage on high-level players attacking a "boss" in one area of the game.

"It (was) meant to spread within the raid group attacking him with the plague as it does...damage to anyone who gets it," Jacobson said.

Pets infect players
What was unexpected, he said, was the way the plague infected players' pets and then later transferred from those pets to others in populated areas of the WoW world.

"People would infect nonplayer characters standing next to each other and continue spreading to any players who wandered nearby," Jacobson said. "Pretty much anyone under level 20 would die from it after getting it."

Blizzard would say only that the plague had been the result of a bug and had been quickly fixed.

But according to Bowman, at least half of the players on his WoW server--the game is broken into numerous servers in order to adequately handle the game's more than 4 million players--were afflicted

Another Game Epidemic

The online game Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) just had a recent epidemic that causes people to -cough- in the chat.

[nightveil]

Re: Another Game Epidemic

The "epidemic" on KoL is still going on. As players become more ill
their chat text turns from black to lighter shades of grey and the -
cough-ing becomes more noticeable.

Suspicions are that this is an in-game storyline similar to others
that have been run in the past, though nothing has been said
officially so far.

[TV James]

Not Realistic

According to the article, there were people who intentionally spread the disease because they thought it was interesting/funny/etc. I assume/hope that there would be fewer people doing that in real life.

Virtual Plague a Test?

I must say that I am a little disturbed to find out that this plague was "an accident." Wheather the company in charge of WoW was trying to play this off as some kind of "mistake" or not, I for some reason have an inclination that there is a possibility that this technology could be used to study the spread of infection desieses. Thus, allowing someone to accuratly calculate a plan for bio-terrorism. I hope i'm just being hypercrytical.

[Valewalker]

Typical Blizzard oversights

Hi I'm valewalker. I can say with how buggy every patch has been. I am very doubtfull on this being on purpose.

This isn't the first bug to get past them on a patch. Also being a game world "Anonymity" of players does make it easyer for the darker side of ones personality to be shown.

People purposely spread it for entertainment in others frustrations.

Anyway. I must admit I was in tears laughing at the chaos..but it was because it was only a game.

I surely wouldnt be laughing it was real lives.