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MMORPG Used to Model Real World Disease
Oxygen99 writes "The Times is reporting on a paper by researchers in the US who argue that the spread of 'corrupted blood' in World of Warcraft might provide clues to the way a real world population would cope with the prospect of a global pandemic. In the study, to be published in The Lancet next month, Professor Lofgren of Rutgers University and Professor Fefferman of Tufts University, suggest that: 'If, God forbid, a disease broke out in London, you could see what would happen if people were told immediately of the risk. Would there be panic and chaos, or would it allow them to psychologically accept the danger and act accordingly? What would happen if we made people feel too reassured? These are all things that have a great impact on the number of people who would be affected. They are also things we just don't know, so [virtual games] could be of great value in helping us understand what their true emotional responses would be.'"
I've seen people deliberately trying to spread the disease in the game. In order to obtain the disease, you need to meet the final boss of the Zul'gurub raid instance, named Hakkar. When Hakkar infects you with the disease, you will then have to hearth back to Orgrimmar or Ironforge to spread the disease before it kills you. Would people do this in real life?
Or can we expect to see suicidal terrorists deliberately infecting themselves and moving into a population...
In weird ways they do. Check out this study from Stanford University.
Essentially it shows that concepts of personal space survive in online games, so the idea that WOW might be a useful insight into real world behaviour is valid.
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The disease in question was rather hurriedly made impossible to spread a week or so after this happened. In other words, TWO YEARS AGO.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6951918.stm
The opinion seems to be while its just a video game it might provide a little insight into how people react to these situations which could be usefull for future modeling.
Yea that is a pretty sweet idea, Everquest 2 had a world event like this in summer of 2005, if i remember correctly. There was a very long drawn out quest that culminated with a raid which when finished provided a permanent cure. I stayed out of the city for a week or more avoiding the plague until some punk ran by on his horse in Zek and infected me. All the stuff that wow players wish blizzard would do SOE is doing with Eq2.