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

Re:realistic?

[snuf23]

True that in a game where death is a recurring event and not final, everyone will probably deliberately spread the plague until they get annoyed of it and want to get back to playing. In real life however, you do still have individuals who through their actions knowingly spread a disease. This was shown to have happened in the outbreak of AIDs, as people who knew they were infected still engaged in practices that spread the infection (unprotected sex, sharing needles). Some of these acts are those of people in denial about their condition, but some are done in a malicious manner, or in anger.