Dr. Nina Fefferman normally studies things like pandemic influenza and early outbreak detection from her lab in New Brunswick, New Jersey. But this week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, she’s talking about a very strange and specific event in the history of epidemiology: A plague that in 2005 affected over 6 million people around the world. . . inside a server on World of Warcraft.The “Corrupted Blood” plague was a virtual disease that started when the massive online RPG introduced a new dungeon called “Zul’Gurub” for its players to explore. The dungeon contained a boss who infected players with a crippling and highly contagious spell called ‘Corrupted Blood’ that sapped players’ hit points for the duration of the battle against him. The only problem was the spell had a glitch.If a player affected by the disease teleported out of the dungeon without either killing or being killed by the boss, they would bring the disease with them and spread it to other players, who would then spread it to more players, and so on. It became so bad that Blizzard Entertainment, Warcraft’s parent company, had no choice but to completely reset the affected servers after days of trying to quarantine the contagion.But what’s really interesting about this virtual outbreak is that scientists like Dr. Feffermen are actually studying it to get insights on the spread of disease in the real world. Sure, the inhabitants are virtual and no real lives were in danger. But when it comes to having a truly diverse sampling of the human species, you aren’t going to get much better than World of Warcraft, whose population is comprised of all age groups, backgrounds and professions.Fefferman noted how the reactions of many players to the online epidemic fell in line with the ways humans have historically reacted to such events. Some panicked and ran around the game’s crowded city centers in search of a cure, infecting others along the way. Others, sensing the end was near and wanting to ‘grief’ other players, ran into large crowds to infect as many people as possible before exploding into a cloud of blood and dying. And some simply avoided the large cities, remained calm and hoped that the whole thing would blow over.These varied reactions, along with Blizzard’s inability to anticipate or contain the pandemonium, led Fefferman to a chilling conclusion: Whether in the virtual world or the real one, the unpredictable nature of human behavior can make quarantining a deadly infectious disease especially difficult, if not impossible.And the scariest part about that, of course, is that our world doesn’t have a Reset button.
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