“Soon, the disease had spread to the densely populated capital cities of (——-), causing high rates of mortality and, much more importantly, the social chaos that comes from a large-scale outbreak of deadly disease” - Nina Fefferman and Eric Lofgren
So what is (——-)? Well that would be “the fantasy world”, as in World of WarCraft. Interestingly enough (as reported on MSNBC), a couple of years ago Blizzard Entertainment introduced a virus into the game, in order to make it more challenging for high level players - but just like that it upped and got itself out of the virtual containment area it was supposed to stay in.
Next thing you know, the disease was spreading like wildfire, and Fefferman and Lofgren started studying it to see what they could learn about how real world diseases spread. Among other things, Fefferman figured out she should build in a “stupid factor” for simulating disease breaks - i.e. people stupid enough to go have a quick look thinking they won’t be contaminated.
Anyways, the idea of learning about how epidemics might spread through analysis of virtual worlds seems kind of interesting… but actually I’m more interested in this stupid factor.
It seems everywhere I look our “models” assume rational behavoir on behalf of participants - from rational investment decisions leading to efficient markets, to not poking the virtual dude with the pulsating red spots, to politicians having war-time exit strategies. Inevitably, it turns out people always do stupid things and our rational models look foolish… could a common stupid factor help all disciplines?
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Hello to everyone!
I’ve learnt about the study of Fefferman and Lofgren, and I’d like to share with you my thoughts. First, a clarification: what happened in World of Warcraft depended from a bug, not from the will of Blizzard Entertainment.
By the way, the core of the research relies on the applicability of the videogamers pattern of behaviour to the reality; I would not like to be radical, but this premise seems to me totally unrealistic. First of all, the disease in the game was easily curable. Such every fantasy worlds, the magic is embedded in, to the point that many characters are magicians, which are able to cure diseases with spells, and there are available many curative potions. This is a factor that reduces the range of the “stupid factor” identified by the authors. However, the focal point is another. Videogamers play Wow, a role-playing game, for fun. The possibility of playing the role of a plague-spreader was an exciting “easter-egg”; an innovative role, different from traditional ones, such as sorcerer, warrior, thief or rogue. Moreover, it was fun, as it involved many players at a time. Even in the first Morrowind, a game published by Bethesda Interactive, there was the “casual” possibility of becoming a lycanthrope and infecting all the other players.
By the way, the question to me is that playing the plague-spreader in a virtual world is absolutely NOT like as doing the same in the reality. In the virtual world there is not the possibility of damaging or killing someone: gamers kills avatars, and it’s not the same than killing a person. And in particular in a game whereas the Player-vs-Player gameplay is a strong point. In Wow, beating and eventually killing other players (in terms of avatars) is one of the aims of the game, so why not playing the plague-spreader and infecting other players? It is part of the game! If we accept the comparison virtual behaviour = real behaviour, we should also accept that in the Middle age part of the population find cool and funny to spread the Black Death…
Comment by poianone - August 23, 2007 8:31 am
[...] Why do you play WoW? Over the past year we have blogged on more than a few occasions about the MMOG World of Warcraft. How it has inspired solutions to email overload. How the U.S. player population is more than 4 times larger than the U.S. agricultural industry. We even talked about how the platform was being used to model the outbreak of infectious diseases. [...]
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