techyum ::

The academic world falls in love with gaming, again. According to Ars Technica, a researcher at Tufts University is in negotiations with Blizzard to run epidemiological tests in WoW. Abstracts published at The Lancet Infectious Diseases (requires login) and Epidemiology shine light on the usefulness of MMORPGs for modeling disease behavior in populations. Both articles focus on a recent "corrupted blood" disease which surfaced in World of Warcraft. What interested the academic community was the way the WoW online community unintentionally mimicked the behavior of real populations during historical epidemics. Surviving players avoided infected cities and large groups of wandering players disappeared from the countryside. Other interesting aspects of the online epidemic were the ability of virtual pets to infect their owners, much like recent avian flu outbreaks, and the games teleportation allowed the disease to "go global" much as air travel does for epidemics in the real world. Snip:

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.

"This was the first time that a virtual virus has infected a virtual human being in a manner resembling an actual epidemiological event," said Fefferman, whose co-author, epidemiologist Eric Lofgren from Tufts University in Boston, was playing the game when the plague struck.

Though I doubt many paying WoW gamers would appreciate letting plagues run amok in their universe, I'm all for developing a new MMORPG, perhaps with a lovely zombie theme. I would pay for the privilege of advancing our understanding of disease.

Until they have manufactured a disease to cross the virtual divide, I'll hold off my dreams of a real life zombie holocaust and find other ways to merge first and second life. The singularity isn't going to happen without us, so back to work. What do you mean everyone's leaving?