Corrupted Blood: Researchers Studys It
In an amusing twist, not only was the Swine Flu preempted by World of Warcraft, researchers are now using WoW as a experimental model to study what would happen in the case of an actual pandemic. The culprit; Corrupted Blood.
In 2005, Blizzard created an in game instance that had a very nasty baddy. In this event players could become infected with a highly deadly pathogen (status ailment) titled corrupted blood. The ailment did damage over time, and could also be passed to any player character within spitting distance of anyone currently infected with the illness. The original purpose of the disease was to cause parties to scatter and rebalance their strategies when teammates became infected. An excellent idea, that is, until it made it back to a populated area.
Nina Fefferman, assistant professor at the Center for Discreet Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey is used this epidemic as a model for tracking how a real pandemic, and people involved would behave in such an event.
Suddenly, there did exist an experimental framework to watch how people would behave during an epidemic, That's exactly what we worry about in real-world epidemics -- the little behaviours that we don't tell people to do or not to do, because we have never seen this happen before.
I always said WoW was practically a disease, but I never actually believed how close to the truth that actually was. Leroy Jenkins for secretary!
Research play games to study pandemics [Canada.com]
[via GamePolitics]
Asterick
Posted to Video Games on 1 May 2009
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: behavioral modeling, pandemic, swine flu, warm blankets for all, wow
From what I can remember, people went into one of three categories: Those that wanted to stay as far away as possible from infection, those that stayed behind to keep people alive at the risk of becoming infected, and those asshole griefers that went long ways to get people infected.
Not as an attack, just letting you know, in Mathematics, it's 'Discrete' and not 'Discreet'
Having only played WoW for a short time (late 2008 to early 2009), I only had the misfortune of experiencing the zombie plague. Reading about the corrupted blood event makes me glad that I didn't start sooner, and learning about the swine flu event makes me glad that I'm not still playing.
And what makes it worse is that this isn't even remotely accurate to what behaviors would be expressed in a real pandemic...unless people in real life are somehow able to effortlessly self-resurrect upon death with little-to-no long term consequences.
It's really alarming that the Swine flu is for real unlike the Corrupted Blood. I couldn't imagine myself having that virus. It just reminded me what happened to my Rogue last 2005. I was busy killing mobs and grinding when some infected player passed the virus to me.
It's really alarming that the Swine flu is for real unlike the Corrupted Blood. I couldn't imagine myself having that virus. It just reminded me what happened to my Rogue last 2005. I was busy killing mobs and grinding when some infected player passed the virus to me.