[Infowarrior] - Blizzard negotiating with researchers for virtual epidemic study

[Richard Forno]

Blizzard negotiating with researchers for virtual epidemic study

By John Timmer | Published: August 21, 2007 - 12:50PM CT

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070821-blizzard-negotiating-with-rese
archers-for-virtual-epidemic-study.html

Around this time two years ago, a strange phenomenon struck the virtual
inhabitants of World of Warcraft. A disease designed to be limited to areas
accessed by high-level characters managed to make it back to the cities of
that virtual world, where it devastated their populations. At the time, Ars'
Jeremy Reimer noted, "it would be even more interesting if epidemiologists
in the real world found that this event was worthy of studying as a kind of
controlled experiment in disease propagation." The epidemiologists have
noticed, and there may be more of these events on the way for WoW players.

There were a number of features in the virtual outbreak that actually
mimicked the spread of and response to real-world epidemics. A key feature
was that the disease could be carried by the game's "pets," the virtual
equivalent of domesticated animals; this behavior is shared by SARS and
avian flu, among other diseases. The game's teleportation acted like air
travel in allowing the disease to rapidly go "global." The humans
controlling the players also mimicked the behavior of real populations
during historical epidemics. As the populations of cities were wiped out by
the disease, surviving players began avoiding them, and any large groups of
players became scarce in the surrounding countryside.

It took only six months for the first academic analysis of the outbreak to
appear in the journal Epidemiology. The article highlighted the advantages
of the WoW incident, comparing it favorably to existing computer models that
"are limited in their potential to account for changes in human behaviors
during epidemics." At the same time, it recognized that virtual characters
might not accurately track all normal human behaviors.

On balance, the analysis in Epidemiology felt that virtual worlds might
provide a useful supplement to traditional models of disease spread, and
suggested working with game programmers to test a variety of disease
conditions. "Multiplayer online role-playing games may even be useful as a
testing ground for hypotheses about infectious disease dissemination," the
author said, "Game programmers could allow characters to be inflicted by
various infectious diseases, some of which may not be visible to the player,
and track the dissemination patterns of the disease in specific
subpopulations." It looks like something of the sort is in the works. A
report from the Agence France-Presse indicates that Nina Fefferman, a
researcher from Tufts University, is currently negotiating with Blizzard
about running epidemiological tests in WoW.

Although this is quite intriguing from a scientific standpoint, it's not
clear whether gamers will come out the winners in these experiments. If the
primary advantage of a virtual game environment is the fact that real human
behavior emerges, then modeling diseases that are not visible to the players
appears to be besides the point. Players have to be aware of the disease,
and it has to be disruptive enough to induce them to change behavior for
such experiments to yield valuable data. Players were apparently fascinated
by the accidental WoW plague, but it's doubtful they'll respond as
positively to a second one, especially if it is inserted into their world
intentionally.

Epidemiology, 18(2), March 2007.