WoW and epidemiology: How scientists are learning from a virtual virus

In September of 2005, something changed. A 'disease', for want of a better word, started spreading across World of Warcraft servers across the world after the introduction of a new high-end monster in a recently created zone. This rapidly became news, and was reported as such by sites such as BBC News, among others. While this wasn't the first time such an event had been reported by news sites (As a quick search reminded me of the now-infamous Sims Guinea Pig Incident), it was the first that I remember being reported as news for the event itself, rather than due to the upset and protest it sparked.

Now, two years on, things have moved a step further: according to the BBC (again), a paper has been published in medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases analysing the outbreak and seeing what can be learned.

For those that don't remember the incident, it went like this: Blizzard introduced the new 10-player dungeon of Zul'Gurub, for players who had reached the then-level-cap of 60, with an all-new version of Hakkar (a massive winged god) awaiting those who cleared the rest of the instance (or at least most of it). One of his abilities was to infect players in his immediate vicinity with a virtual disease called corrupted blood, which caused significant damage to the high-level players attempting to defeat him, and spreading from player to player in the group.

Some clever chap (assuming it was a chap) realised that there was some fun to be had here (it would appear) on seeing that his pet became infected with this disease, and promptly dismissed it still infected. The important thing to note here is that at the time you could freely dismiss and recall pets, and their state would not change in the meantime -- they would essentially vanish, and go into suspended animation, to then reappear when resummoned. The player in question then teleported himself back to the Orc capital city of Orgrimmar on the server of Archimonde, went to a crowded area, and summoned his freshly infected pet. At this point, all hell broke loose. The disease, which was meant to be a serious inconvenience for some of the game's toughest players, was suddenly infecting many of the weakest, and killing them in the space of seconds. The streets of cities were littered with corpses, and many of those resurrecting themselves were instantly reinfected by those who had survived, and by various non-player chracters who had turned into carriers of the disease, by virtue of being infectable but much, much harder to kill than players.

The reason this is of interest to the author of the piece from LID is that they feel that the way that WoW players reacted offered valuable insight into the way that actual massive disease outbreaks can or could be handled by the populace. Some players acted selflessly, trying to heal others or cure the disease (as certain classes have the ability to remove such effects from others), others just ran away, and others made it their mission to keep the infection alive and continue the mayhem.

The report's author, 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."

According to the BBC, she did also acknowledge that the fact it was just a game and the people in question were not risking any harm to anything other than their in-game bank balances, but felt it was still as valuable a tool as we have for assessing some of the possible reactions to a major real-life outbreak.

It was also noted that the human factor is the least understood of disease-transmission variables, but also the hardest to study given that you can hardly infect a city full of people just to observe the ensuing panic... but that it is, in theory, possible to do so virtually.

I shall try and track down the paper itself, but even the BBC's precis on it gives food for thought. Do you think that such virtual studies could be useful? Do you think it would be ethical to induce changes in gameworlds for real-life research, without informing participants, as part of the game experience?