Slashdot Mirror
Studying the Plague in WoW
Nimrod writes 'NPR has a piece on studying the 'Plague' in the virtual world, World of Warcraft. From the piece: 'Spread of virus or disease has a lot to do with human behavior ... Hardest part about researching human behavior is that people often act differently in an emergency than they imagine they will... Peoples reaction to the plague in World of Warcraft were remarkable realistic... Some decided that once they were infected, I really don't care anymore about anyone else, I'm going to teleport in the game to a crowed urban center and infect as many people as I can.' We've discussed this before, but as it has been picked up by the major news outlets it appears to be accumulating commentary about how virtual behavior mimics societal trends. The NPR piece goes into more depth on the subject.
Why couldn't more events like this happen in MMO worlds? I have to say, this is much more interesting than your standard organized battles or the like.
My other sig is funny.
Some people are going to misbehave like that precisely because they can. In real life they probably wouldn't, but they know it's a game and want to see how acting differently will change things. I don't think this behaviour while playing games is particularly worrisome. I played D&D but I haven't killed any evil elves yet in real life.
Because without those, all the piece says is:Which is actually less informative than the Slashdot post.
Oh, and while we're on the subject of World of Warcraft, you should probably have already mentioned that Blizzard has announced that the as-of-yet unnamed expansion pack will be playable at BlizzCon.
The Hate Plague, in Transformers. In fact, that'd be a really fun plague to have in a game. Sort of like a mass-berserk plague.
"I'm a pepper. Don't you want to be a pepper too?"
they're not saying this is a worrying precedent, that people might act like this in the real world some day. they have history books. this is exactly what happens during major plagues. I guess if you know you're going to die really soon, at least a few people will feel alright aboutn infecting others.
see AIDS for a more common everyday example of this in real life.
This has got to be the first /.ing of public radio.
-Tyr1
I'm sorry, I don't by it.
There may be some social studies possible in MMORPG, but a plague is a serious RL issue which can not be adequatly represented.
Well, it could, but it would mean after being infected, if you can't find a cure, your character is deleted. That would be fun from an observer's perspective.
But even that doesn't come close. I mean, plagues KILL people like you and me. Most people knowingly infected with a diesease would not purposefully act to hurt others unless they had premonitions of hurting them beforehand, and even if they did, the rest of the community would be acting to prevent such things, via quarantine.
I play EQ2, which had a plague event back in June, and people didn't like the plague, but you did infect your friends for fun, as a joke, because you know it's not real.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
The gay flight attendant who knew he was infected led a lot of people on a merry (Mary?) chase.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Don't people already do this in real life with AIDS?
I hate to say this, but I just have to laugh everytime I see something like this. Someone makes a "plague" that runs amok in WoW... wow! Revolutionary! First time that's been done in an MMO!
Um, hardly. That's baby-step stuff. Just like most everything that is considered "new and revolutionary" in MMOs, is flippin old hat to those of us who've been doing online games for a zillion years now (read: zillion = 18+ years). I had a plague run amok in GemStone ][ some 14 odd years ago. And we've sure as heck done a lot more interesting things than that in the years since.
This isn't news. It's just becoming more well known. I don't mind that, I just wish people had more MMO history in their brain pan.
David Whatley
I wonder if in the future Blizzard will create special sections for just researchers to use. There, they can model any disease by attributing the disease with real-life characteristics such as contagiousness and deadliness. This, way, researchers will not need to create their own virtual world while WoW players will be immune from the next cyber-Ebola pandemic.
It's not at all realistic. If they wanted at least some semblance of realism, make people have to wait 10 mins to resurrect when they die with the plague, or res with forced res sickness. Allow people to attack people that have the plague, and once they attack be attacked in return. Or even better, make the plague infect you with 'res sickness' as well as some damage, so you cant be a 60 warrior/priest group combo and just mow down all of IF. There are so many cool possibilities. So when someone tries to run around spreading it, people can take that person down, and prevent further infection. That would be much more entertaining than people running into the AH while infected and watching all the level 1 mules drop like flies.
Which lets face it, is pretty damn funny to begin with.
I actually thought that the plague was an awesome idea when I first saw it in effect, it meant that all these level 60s were running around like chickens sans heads calling for heals and bitching, instead of standing around comparing armor, pointlessly dueling or spamming LFG/LFM messages. It was champagne comedy.
Yep, the Wikipedia has the WoW plague as well!
Do you play with your Willy?
1) Players low balled the plauges ability to spread. I'm sure most just thought it would hand on their characters for a short bit, then disappear. When's the last time we saw a status ailment in anygame behave like this? Players didn't know what they were doing.
Well, save for some grievers who had the time of their pathedic virgin lives.
A lot of times, these diseases spread becuase of human ignorance. The contaminated blood is no different.
2) Containing and curing the epideminc. While transport in WoW is much more rapid then the real world, making the disease easier to spread, Blizzard was able to get a fix up in a short time. While WoW is hardly realistic in determining how a real world scenario would work, this is, so far, the best virtual model we have yet.
It kind of reminds me of Team Fortress Classic, whe the asshated n00b would catch the medics disease, and run sraight to the supply/respawn room to get medpacs, ifecting those near him. Over time, we learn that such silliness is not in the best interets of us, or the team, so we avoid most human contact and ask for medical assistance.
But when it happens out right out of the blue, BAM, logic goes to shit.
I made an amusing object in a development MUD once, It's property was that if you saw it (in the environment, or by inspecting another player), it would copy itself into your inventory and delete itself before being listed, unless you were inspecting your own inventory, in which case it would copy itself into the environment and delete itself from your inventory.
That is, normally an unlistable object would be impossible, because even if it returned no name, the MUD code would provide the name of the parent class (that is, if a 'Sword' name function returned an error, the player would see 'Unnamed Weapon') all the way up the 'Unnamed Object' base class, but by deleting itself, there was no parent class left.
Unfortunetly, I made a typo in the self-deletion code and it would occasionally delete the next object in the players inventory. (when the player received another object after the moving object, but before the object moved out of his inventory) but it would still make the copy of itself.
oops.
Yes, in that history does show that once someone doesn't care (any more) about what happens to them (e.g., because they're going to die anyway), there's nothing you can do to keep them in line. Most you can do is take them out of the game: e.g., lock them away in a prison or kill them.
The same applies to games, and I wish more designers did learn that from history. (It would have prevented the UO fuckup, for a start.) Once someone doesn't give a damn about what happens to their character, nothing you can possibly do to their character will deter them. In-character justice just doesn't work on them. All you can do is take them out of the game: e.g., ban.
No, in that the setting is a bit different. We're not talking a case of "waah, I'm gonna die! The world is so cruel! I'm gonna have my revenge against this cruel world!" We're most likely talking about people who never gave a damn about their character, and much less about the minor bother of having to respawn. We're talking people who most likely just saw it as a case of "awesome! now I can kill newbies with this!"
There's a whole category of people who pays that monthly fee purely to annoy, troll, and cause as much distress as possible. Their supreme achievement is managing to drive someone completely off the game. I.e., griefers.
They also don't like taking risks, and their favourite kind of target is one which can't even possibly defend at all. E.g., one who's 20 levels lower and preferrably idle. And Blizzard just gave them the equivalent of nuke which does just that: run up to a bunch of newbies, and they're dead with no chance to defend. Far from making them desperate or depressed or anything even remotely similar to RL plagues, it probably just made their day.
It's not even something new. Bartle described that very same category back in the days of MUDs.
So, hey, there's an idea for designers: if learning from history is too much of a bother, at least learn from what was already discovered in other games. MUDs ran into most of the same problems ages ago.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...but even with that, I think it's important to note that the human behavior in the game is based on real-life (because for some, the game is their life).
Somewhere in the replies I read something along the lines of, "Most people knowingly infected with a diesease would not purposefully act to hurt others". I find this comment laughable(Granted, it's slightly out of context). How many of you go to work sick? You know your sick but yet you still go. Why? Then, at work, the germ distribution system (HVAC) works to it's fullest to help insure that as many co-workers (and in turn, their families) get infected as possible. This is compounded even further when you work in an office building that contains multiple companies.
You and I might not go running around purposely infecting people with some deadly disease, but then again, I don't think we would go stealing TVs after a natural disaster or run into a subway and blow ourselves up. Are you that naive to think that there's not one person in your city that has penchant for destruction? A person who might feel it's unfair that they have been infected with a deadly disease or may not understand that they are a carrier of a disease (Typhod Mary). There are many sick minds out there ( I happen to be one of them, so I know). I would disregard the news blurb, just because I wouldn't do it.
Pandemics occur both on purpose and by accident.
Sorry for any indiscretions from my original post. It was my first on slashdot. I was giddy as a school girl to have something that no one else has yet posted that I rushed to be first. I'm so happy. My life is now complete. It didn't occur to me to mention the audio file until after I posted the thread. I just started playing WOW, so I didn't know about an expansion...
This isn't how people would react in the real life, we all should understand that of course, but in a game, people have wants and desires, just like real life. It could be Desire to gain levels (grow stronger), Desire to gain wealth(greed), Desire to hurt others (masochists), or desire to solve problems (care givers), but if you notice, while each of these things likely arn't the same as these people would do in real life, the actions do exist at least for others in the real world.
I doubt that they meant to make it "if you do something with the plague it tells you about your real self." It is more it shows them a social system with people of varying desires and ideas after someone introduces a deadly virus. This is something that is almost impossible to study because most people would think someone studying this type of thing instead of helping is a ghoul, yet it should be studied because response systems obviously arn't doing it when everyone passes the buck.
Now as people have meantioned this likely isn't real life, but notice that once you have the plague you're given a death sentance for the most part, what you do from that point changes everything. Those that run and try to harm others with their plague are actually a real thing. There are those with serious problems (Aids and other life threatening STDs) who will go around and try to infect others because they think there's no quality of life and just like hurting others. There are those who try to avoid this. But both of these reactions are seen in game as well as in the real world. The numbers are schewed but the reaction still exists.
The point is that the study isn't saying people are acting like they would in real life (and if they were it wouldn't be interesting because of the people who would play these games arn't an accurate subsection of people, especially those who would sacrifice their lifes to hurt others) but they are studying the reactions of people in the game. The fact is while the percentage of certain reactions are different, those reactions are very similar to real life components.
That all being said, I have to say KUDOS KUDOS KUDOS to Blizzard, because they have created a game I would be interested in and because of that I bought and played it. This plague alone has my interest peaked which makes it great.
But certainly, the dynamics of how the plague spreads, as well as how information on what the plague is and how to combat it are quite useful bits of information.
The story of the plague isn't simply the griefers and pranksters running around doing this, but the interpretations of _what_ it is by the general population (malicious attack, divine punishment, or simple screwup), the speed with which your average gamer changes (drastically) playing style to cope with the new reality, and the attempts at fixes and reactions of the players to the fixes. That's sociological gold. I'm reading these narratives in the light of accounts of 1347-1351, and there are some parallels.
.The kids running around infecting people because they're infected aren't the extent of what happens in a MMO-pandemic.
Come on people. I think a lot can be learned about human nature through mmorpgs, but a lot of the stuff I'm reading on here is bunk. Why are people in WoW so careless about spreading the plague? BECAUSE YOU RESPAWN. It's not a big deal. End of story.
If we respawned in real life, putting a pipe bomb in your buddy's mailbox might move up a few rungs on the humor ladder.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
The story was interesting to listen to, but I think that some of the scientists quoted in the story over-estimate how "real" most players view the game. Several talked about players' strong emotional attachments to their characters and how the game was a part of their lives. Howevever, I don't think all players have the same level of attachment - there's a scale between serious role playing and viewing it as "just a game" or "just a piece of software". I think many of the players who "infected" the major cities would be on the "just a game" side of the scale- they figured out how they could take a combination of particular game features and cause something unforeseen to happen. They knew that all they were doing was decrementing a value in a data structure - not harming a living being.
If anything, it'd be interesting to see if infections ever happened on the Role Playing servers at all - since intentionally infecting your home town would essentially make you a traitor if you're role playing.
Peoples reaction to the plague in World of Warcraft were remarkable realistic... Some decided that once they were infected, I really don't care anymore about anyone else, I'm going to teleport in the game to a crowed urban center and infect as many people as I can.
So are people now so self centered that now that they know they are going to die they're thinking "If I'm going down then you are all coming down with me?" Is this really how people think? It's a very sad world we live in.
We should accept, with "thunderous applause", President Bush's proposal on using the military in domestic law enforcement roles in the event of a bird flu.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
+3 interesting anti-gay flame, thanks to you, o moderators on crack!
At one point I was a faithful player of Sims Online (I was the owner of a trailer park wedding chaple). Now looking back on it, I would pay money to be able to spread chaos and rashes to my newly weds. Oh damn......... vengence. Its always way more fun to use your time for evil.
Have you seen muh baseball?