Researchers Want To Test How The Plague Would Spread In World Of Warcraft
A fantasy plague that accidentally ran amok in the Internet's most popular game world, populated by nine million flesh-and-blood players, may help scientists predict the impact of genuine epidemics, according to a study released Tuesday.
Virtual playgrounds such as World of Warcraft could soon become testing grounds for the all-too-real battle against bird flu, malaria or some as yet unknown killer virus, one of the authors, Nina Fefferman of Rutgers University in New Jersey, told AFP.
The unlikely path to a collaboration between hard science and hard-core gaming began in late 2005, when Blizzard programmers introduced a highly contagious disease -- dubbed "Corrupted Blood" -- into a newly created zone of the game's Byzantine environment.
At first the "patch", as new elements such as the disease are called, worked as expected: experienced players shrugged it off like a bad cold, and weaker ones were left with disabled avatars.
But then things spun out of control. As in reality, some of those carrying the virus slipped back into the virtual world's densely populated cities, rapidly infecting their defenseless inhabitants.
The disease also spread -- much like real influenza or the plague -- via domesticated animals abandoned by players for fear of infecting their avatars, leaving the sickened pets to roam freely.
Programmers tried to set up quarantines, but they were ignored. Finally, they resorted to an option not available in the real world: they shut down the servers and rebooted the system.
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