Alvin Soong’s Blog

This is really interesting… Virtual diseases offer insight on how people react to outbreaks

COPENHAGEN - THE elves, orcs and serpentine monsters that do battle in the popular online game World of Warcraft (WoW) may help scientists fight the next epidemic, two epidemiologists said.

Two years ago, an epidemic hit the United States, Europe and Asia, spreading quickly to four million people and striking down the weakest in Warcraft, the virtual computer game currently populated by about 8.5 million players.

To rid the game of the so-called ‘corrupted blood’, game operator Blizzard Entertainment Inc had to reset the computers.

To epidemiologists Eric Lofgren the episode was a missed opportunity to study how people react to a quickly spreading disease without anyone really dying. The computers were reset before the researchers had a chance to study the outbreak.

In an article in yesterday’s The Lancet, the researchers propose that such illnesses be integrated intentionally into games.

‘Studies impossible to undertake on actual populations can be run as in-game events, and the data collected would be free from any biases because they would be recorded from servers,’ Mr Lofgren and Ms Fefferman wrote.

Existing tools for predicting human behaviour, based on observational animal studies and mathematical computer models, are incomplete because they can’t fully account for the unexpected and varied reactions of humans, the researchers said.

In the World of Warcraft epidemic, characters got infected with corrupted blood in battling with a new character called Hakkar.

Hakkar, a winged serpentine monster who could afflict opponents with the infectious corrupted blood affliction, was introduced in 2005 by the developers as a challenge for strong players.

Strong characters were weakened, though not killed, as they fought the monster. Some transported out of the battle, or transported their pets, to new areas of the game, carrying the corrupted blood to weaker characters who often died.

Seeing players dying, others with healing powers rushed to help, sometimes contracting and spreading the disease themselves. Others moved to less densely populated areas of the game or left the game entirely for a time, the researchers said.

Blizzard’s efforts to quarantine sick players failed because the disease was so contagious and isolating game areas proved difficult.

‘By using these games as an untapped experimental framework, we may be able to gain deeper insight into the incredible complexity of infectious disease epidemiology in social groups,’ the researchers said.

To date, epidemiologists have relied heavily on mathematical simulations. But crunching numbers has limitations, says Ms Fefferman.

‘There is no way to model how people will behave’ in a public crisis, she said.

Some sceptics have suggested that gamers are more willing to take risks online than in the flesh, and Ms Fefferman acknowledges there is a difference.

But most players have invested a lot of time and energy into strengthening their avatars and forming alliances. For many, psychologists say, their virtual creations have become alter egos.

‘We don’t mean to suggest that people’s reactions in this game would exactly mirror their reactions in real life,’ she said.

‘But I think it is the closest thing we have to something that people really do become emotionally invested in protecting.’

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