Video Games and Pandemics
LINK: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/cellular-microscopic/spam-hiv1.htm
While many parents gripe and complain about how video games are useless pastimes, video games can actually tell us a lot about social networks – including how they change during a pandemic. This blog will specifically focus on World of Warcraft, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) where people connected to a server, created a character, and played as that character in a virtual world with other people online.
On September 13, 2005, the developers of World of Warcraft introduced a new quest line or raid as part of a game update. Its final boss, Hakkar, had an attack called Corrupted Blood that significantly damaged players over time, often times killing off lower level players within seconds. In addition, this attack was contagious and spread easily to nearby characters. This “disease” would either fade out over time during the Hakkar battle or kill the character. Either way, the disease was contained within the boss arena.
Or so the programmers thought. In World of Warcraft, a player can have pets to battle alongside them. And since the pets were target-able characters as well, Corrupted Blood affected them too. Unfortunately, an error in code forgot to erase the disease when pets left the arena.
And so the Corrupted Blood incident began – the pets spread the disease to their players, and players spread the disease to other players. The pandemic would have only lasted for a few seconds since the disease was erased after a player dies, but unfortunately, the disease also spread to non-playable characters (NPCs) that could not die. The Corrupted Blood plague was perpetuated and spread quickly across the WoW world. Those who were higher-leveled took damage but survived, but lower leveled characters were wiped out. Heavily trafficked areas such as markets, banks, hubs, and even highways were soon littered with skeletons (literally) of the victims and were avoided for the fear of coming into contact with the infected. The healers quickly became a high commodity. Finally, though, the code was fixed and the Corrupted Blood incident ended.
The carnage left by the Corrupted Blood incident
This video game disaster soon caught the attention of pathologists in the sense that the way the disease and the society it affected behaved was very similar to the way disease and society behaved in the real world. Many major plagues – the Bubonic Plague, the Spanish Flu, the Avian Flu, HIV – began with animal carriers. Like the rats, livestock, birds, and apes that transferred disease, the pets spread the Corrupted Blood debuff as well. When the disease raged and the disease was spread from person to person, common places where many people gathered were soon avoided so that individuals had a lower chance of becoming infected. Doctors were highly sought after. And, of course, many people died. Of course the Corrupted Blood incident is not a perfect model of a real-world pandemic. People come back to life after dying in WoW, the diseased were difficult to quarantine due to teleportation, and the system models individuals and not groups of individuals like families. Still, it is an interesting idea to think of we can use virtual networks to model physical ones.