WOW: new testing ground to observe epidemics
There was a virtual disease in the World of Warcraft which was called “Corrupted Blood” which has swept the game since September 2005, The game’s administrators introduced the disease as a challenge for some high-level players; they didn’t expect it to break out of the caves and into the virtual world’s cities and towns. The disease then ravaged the player population; this is despite administrators’ efforts to quarantine the infected and gave World of Warcraft its first virtual-world pandemic. Researchers used the artificial and virtual world of warcraft to observe how a disease may behave in a population. It was originally designed to affect only high-level World of Warcraft characters, for clues about what the social response might be to an actual pandemic. The game provided the authors of a research paper set to be published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal a unique set of conditions for this research that had typically been difficult to simulate: A wide population, an emotional response (because WoW players get really attached to their characters) and the ability to disseminate information among the population.