A Virtual Epidemic
by Sheila Read
In September 2005 an epidemic called Corrupted Blood ran rampant on the online role-playing game World of Warcraft. It killed so many players that the fantasy world’s major cities were uninhabitable.
As players mourned the deaths of their characters, an epidemiology student saw an opportunity.
Popular games such as World of Warcraft could allow epidemiologists to improve their predictions of how people behave during epidemics, Eric Lofgren says.
Epidemiologists use computer simulations in their planning for pandemic influenza. “We make all of these assumptions about human behavior,” Lofgren says. “What if none of them are true?”
But online gaming could help. World of Warcraft is the largest of what are known as massively multi-player online role-playing games, in which players create virtual characters who go on quests, battle monsters, and interact with other characters.
Players take the game seriously. Lofgren, who admits he spent “too much” time playing World of Warcraft as an undergraduate, says, “there are people who treat it like a full-time job.”
Because players invest so much effort in developing their virtual characters, the game offers opportunities for the study of human behavior, Lofgren says.
Game designers created Corrupted Blood as a challenge to powerful players fighting a winged serpent named Hakkar in a remote region of the game world. They did not foresee the spread of the disease to weaker players, who died in droves. The disease spread rapidly in part because of the ability of characters to transport themselves instantly to other locations — similar to how people traveling by airplane spread disease.
The Corrupted Blood epidemic provided several insights into behavior. “The amount of altruistic behavior was very surprising to us,” Lofgren says. Many players deliberately went to infected areas to attempt to heal others who were ill, only to become infected themselves.
Other players violated the quarantine set up by game creator Blizzard Entertainment to try to contain the disease. And a few players acted as “super spreaders,” deliberately trying to infect others, Lofgren says.
Unfortunately for epidemiologists, no one was collecting data during the epidemic that could have allowed for detailed analysis of how characters spread the disease.
That’s what Lofgren and his former advisor, Nina Fefferman of Tufts University, hope to change before the next online epidemic emerges. The challenge will be to get game-makers’ cooperation.
Sheila Read is a master’s student in journalism at Carolina.
Eric Lofgren is a doctoral student in epidemiology in the School of Public Health. He coauthored an article, “The Untapped Potential of Virtual Game Worlds to Shed Light on Real World Epidemics,” that appeared in the September 2007 issue of Lancet: Infectious Diseases.
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