Epidemic in Online Game Offers Real-life Lessons

Kim Krisberg - The Nation's Health

IT TURNS out humans aren't the only ones susceptible to an infectious disease outbreak.

A programming error in World of Warcraft, an online game with 4 million players worldwide, turned into a full-blown disease epidemic in 2005, providing a highly realistic glimpse into how people would truly react during a real-world outbreak. Unlike computer models, which can't predict the full range of human behavior, game characters mimicked the behavior of their human players. And because the outbreak was completely unintentional on the part of the programmers, the disease's spread mirrored a real epidemiological event, according to Nina Fefferman, PhD, a mathematical epidemiologist who co-authored a study on the virtual outbreak published in the September issue of the Lancet.

The outbreak began when the game began allowing higher-level players access to an area where they encountered a character who had the power to infect others with "corrupted blood." According to the study, corrupted blood posed only a minor health threat to powerful players, however a gamewide epidemic began after a number of infected characters moved to populated areas before being killed or cured.

Even more interesting than the disease's spread was the reaction of the players, Fefferman said. Some players who were safe from corrupted blood moved toward epidemic centers out of curiousity - a behavior real-life epidemiologists don't take into account, she said. Also, characters with healing powers mimicking the probable behavior of first responders - moved toward the epidemic to help people, becoming infected themselves and spreading the disease even further.

"This is a great experimental set-up, especially for mathematical epidemiologists, who usually take human behavior as a given," she said.

In the end, game programmers were unable to contain the outbreak, but had one weapon in their arsenal that public health workers don't: resetting the game.

More game news