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.

Comments

MUDS

[Kaenneth]

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.