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

Creativity is accidental

[grogdamighty]

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.

Re:Creativity is accidental

[Taevin]

What I would like to see is a team of developers that aren't afraid to 'grief' players every now and then. By that I don't mean camping spawn points with their level 9999999 character they programmed just for themselves (although that could be a fun experience too :-). I'm talking about random events like natural disasters that destroy a town or hinder resource flow. Or NPC enemy groups that wage war on players and player owned towns/castles/whatever. Just anything unexpected that totally messes up people's routines. Of course this should be balanced with good things occasionally as well.

Mostly what I'm tired of is games forcing everyone to be equal so that it's "fair" to everyone. All that seems to have succeeded in doing is making the games incredibly boring after a certain point. Wow you mean my level 60 paladin is exactly the same as the other 400,000 level 60 paladins in the game... exciting. There should be elements in the game that distinguish individuals or groups. It's much more interesting to have competition for resources and locations than competing for raw number of kills that nets you some meaningless PvP title.

I'd also like to see constant PvP return to mainstream games, and I'm hardly a hardcore PvP player. The constant threat of death (especially if death is meaningful in some way) adds an extra level of player interaction that I think helps to prevent games from becoming stale so easily. I used to play Asheron's Call on the Darktide server (PvP always) and until they added housing to the game, there was no truly safe place that you could escape being killed. Player created monarchies actually fought to defend and control the towns with the best locations/vendor rates. You just don't see that in many other games. In AC, I was constantly aware of my surroundings in the game and prepared to fight at any moment. When I play WoW, unless I'm specifically looking for a fight, I just don't care. There is almost no penalty for death so most of the time it's not worth the effort to quickly shift from idly watching my character run to town and into battle mode.

I realize that it's not that simple. The people that play these games are notoriously whiny, and the developer's of a game do have to worry about keeping their customer base. What I see happen all too much though is a working system that is constantly tweaked in an effort to balance it or make things fair, at the behest of the most vocal group that feels that since their particular character/class is not the most powerful in their perception, there is something wrong with the game. Dueling weaknesses and strengths of different types of characters and player attitudes make an interesting environment that will stay enjoyable longer. Removing wood's weakness to fire and fire's weakness to water and so on just leaves a static system where nothing changes and it becomes boring very fast. I wish people would wake up and realize that it's not all about them, and I wish developers would stop screwing with their system that most are pleased with just to satisfy the least common denominator.

missed the point

[xilmaril]

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.

realistic?

[Joe the Lesser]

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 hate to say this....

[nsxdavid]

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.

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.