What a WoW virtual outbreak taught us about how humans behave in epidemics, ars technica

Blizzard thought this would ensure the infection wouldn’t spread beyond that space. They were wrong. Rather than standing their ground, many infected players panicked, teleporting out of the dungeon before dying or killing Hakkar, and taking the disease with them. And lower ranking players, with fewer hit points, would “die” very quickly upon exposure. The largest factor in the rapid spread of the disease was a glitch in the programming, such that non playable animal companions also became infected. They did not show symptoms, but they were carriers, and ended up spreading the disease even faster. As Corrupted Blood

infections spread uncontrollably, game spaces became littered with virtual “corpses,” and players began to panic. Efforts at quarantine proved unsuccessful in stopping the outbreak. In the end, at least three servers were affected, and Blizzard had to reboot the entire game to correct the problem.

published in Lancet Infectious Diseases examining the potential implications of the Corrupted Blood incident for refining existing epidemiological models, since they would be able to draw on hard data showing how players actually responded during an outbreak. For instance, some players tried to help with healing spells, inadvertently making matters worse, since their efforts endured constant replenishment of those susceptible to the spell, rather than letting the outbreak run its course. There were the inevitable thrill seekers who went to the infected areas out of curiosity, becoming new victims, which Fefferman has likened to journalists traveling to war zones who put themselves in harm’s way to get a story. There were a handful of players who maliciously spread the infection on purpose — something that has been documented in real-world outbreaks — and one player even took on the role of a Doomsday prophet, standing in the town square to narrate the carnage unfolding in the game. Fefferman is now at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville , where she studies how tiny individual decisions can result in major changes across a given population. That earlier work on the Corrupted Blood outbreak continues to inform her research. “It led me to think really deeply about how people perceive threats and how differences in that perception can change how they behave, “ Fefferman recently told PC Gamer . “A lot of my work since then has been in trying to build models of the social construction of risk perception, and I don’t think I would have come to that as easily if I hadn’t spent time thinking about the discussions (WoW players had in real time about Corrupted Blood and how to act in the game, based on the understanding they built from those discussions. ”