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 on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Virtual playgrounds such as World of Warcraft, launched in 2004, 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.<\/p>\n
Discussions are underway, she confirmed, with the game's California-based manufacturer, Blizzard, a unit of French media giant Vivendi, on how future updates might yield useful scientific data.<\/p>\n
"As technology and biology become more heavily integrated in daily life, this small step towards the interaction of virtual viruses and humans could become highly significant," she said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
World of Warcraft is a "multiplayer online role-playing game" in which players — numbering in the tens, or hundreds of thousands — use computer-controlled avatars to fight battles, form alliances, and dialogue simultaneously on the Internet. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
"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.<\/p>\n
The authors had already discussed the possibility of using online gaming to study the spread of disease, and thus immediately recognized the opportunity.<\/p>\n
To date, epidemiologists have relied heavily on mathematical simulations to forecast the spread of contagious diseases across large populations. <\/p>\n
But crunching numbers has limitations, says Fefferman. "There is no way to model how people will behave" in a pubic crisis, she said. <\/p>\n
"How many will run away from a quarantine? Will they become more or less cooperative if they are scared? We simply don't know."<\/p>\n
Which is where the virtual netherworlds come into the picture. They can help scientists to "feed appropriate parameters into existing epidemiological models," she said.<\/p>\n
Some skeptics have suggested that gamers are more willing to take risks online than in the flesh, and Fefferman acknowledges there is a difference. <\/p>\n
But most players have invested a lot of time and energy into strengthening their avatars and forming alliances. For many, psychologists say, their virtual creations have become alter egos.<\/p>\n
"We don't mean to suggest that people's reactions in this game would exactly mirror their reactions in real life," she said. <\/p>\n
"But I think it is the closest thing we have to something that people really do become emotionally invested in protecting."<\/p>\n
The researchers are working on a proposal for a new patch that would be a "compromise between what gamers would most enjoy and what would be most scientifically useful," she said.<\/p>\n
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