Word is buzzing around the internet about a highly infectious disease currently wiping out whole towns of avatars in the online RPG World of Warcraft. As Clive Thompson explains in his Collision Detection blog:
"The trouble began when Blizzard, the company that runs World of Warcraft, introduced a new opponent called Hakkar, the "god of blood". When you fight him, as a defense he infects you with something called "Corrupted Blood", which shaves off your hit points so rapidly that your character dies very quickly. Problem is, the Blood is infectious -- get close enough to another player and you'll pass on the disease."
Apparently, one of the key problems here (apart from the whole bizarre idea of spreading a digital Ebola in the first place), is that players constantly resist any attempts by GMs to quarantine them, so the disease spreads with impunity. If online RPGs are the huge social experiment many commentators make them out to be, this says some revealing and unpleasant things about how humans really behave in a crisis. Indeed, Thompson goes on to suggest:
"Maybe we should be using online games to study the effects of a real-world bioterror attack? Maybe FEMA and the government should hire Blizzard to build them an online world, and populate it with players by offering it for free. Then researchers can test the effects of a contagious bioterror attack such as smallpox - by releasing a virtual version of it, and seeing how players react."
Of course, there's always the possibility that this is, in fact, what's actually happening...
Read more here.
