An inadvertent plague that decimated the virtual population of a popular online game has piqued the interest of disease trackers and public-health planners.
They suggest the "corrupted blood" epidemic that triggered an unplanned die-off of players of World of Warcraft offers real-life lessons for how people might respond in the event of a global outbreak of disease.
As a result of the incident, some researchers are already eagerly exploring the possibility of using popular simulation games to explore scientific questions for which real-life experiments could not ethically be mounted.
"By using these games as an untapped experimental framework, we may be able to gain deeper insight into the incredible complexity of infectious disease epidemiology in social groups," two U.S. researchers from Rutgers University and Tufts University said in a paper published yesterday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The researchers, Eric Lofgren and Nina Fefferman, said this first major virtual world plague and others like it could help bridge the gap between real-world studies and mathematical models, which are limited in terms of their ability to predict how people will react when faced with a situation such as a disease threat.
Ran Balicer, an epidemiologist in the faculty of health sciences at Ben-Gurion University in Negev, Israel, sees great promise in this virtual accident.
"Basically, I believe this is the next evolutionary step in infectious disease modelling," Dr. Balicer said.
Death moved swiftly through the World of Warcraft universe in September, 2005, after a winged serpent infected players in an advanced level with a disease called "corrupted blood." For them, the ailment was trivial, but when they teleported back to other levels of the game, they infected players with lesser skill levels for whom the disease was lethal.
Dr. Fefferman, a mathematical ecologist at Tufts, said piecing together the way people behaved as the contagion spread taught her some unexpected lessons about human behaviour.
One was what she called the "stupid factor," which led some players to approach the carnage out of curiosity rather than flee to protect themselves.
