I think what they're saying is that using certain ideas, they can simulate what a particular disease does to someone without having any risk of spreading. Like comparing the debuff spell that was mentioned in WoW to the common cold. What if people affected by them were put in certain areas, could others who had no contact with them still obtain the disease? I think that that's what they're getting at.

Matthew, I think researcher will know what to do not to piss gamer off if they get help from the game developer.

Instead of actually killing the characters, just have a tracking tag to see how one person can spread the diseases if uncontained. Also there can be a virtual containment that contain the tag when a character enter an area and if the character leave, the tag will stay and the character will never be effected by that tag. In the research model the tag staying act as if it kill the character in the contain area (with out actually killing him/her).

It would be a great model for spreading decease, but not actually the genetic of a disease.

Also, there could be some immunity for certain player of a certain level or cast, and do the research for with the tag method.

There also could be a special server to encourage people to join the research for a month or so. And make sure that characters' stat in that server won't change for the time and that server. Player who died first can respond as people who place quarantine, and simulate how effective different way are.

With all this, why don't they make a MMO for the researcher, and have people from the scientific community and collage volunteer to join. They can call it Pandemic Online.

WoW really is a good way to study when you think about it. Honestly, until it happens in the real world, we're not going to get a perfect study on it. Any volunteers for that one?

But think about it for a minute. There's a diverse range of personalities and ages, although not true to reality. It wasn't confined to a single country. Unlike other virtual simulations, it has real people controlling the population. There was no thought at the time of it being a study, so that didn't affect the actions of the population at all. And it wasn't an AI where we could control and predict actions.

Obviously it's not perfect. It's not completely true to life. Based on my reasons though, I'd say it's something to add to the files.

-Mike Schwinger

I recall an earlier GP where someone was discussing using MMO systems to study macrobiology like this. I think they cited Second Life as being a massive, living petri dish where all sorts of types of infection can be simulated in a reasonably realistic world. (Except for all the furries, naturally.) Mass disaster is another potentially useful study point. Didn't a boss break out of their usual haunt a while ago too? It could be interesting to see the effects of a hurricane or similar in a virtual world.

Although maybe not WoW, where people would be up in arms about having their characters destroyed as part of an experiment. These players get angry when their favourite class has a stat drop.

Part of the reason why the WoW pandemic is studied so much is because it was completely accidental. And the only way that they could get rid of it was shutting down all the servers and clearing the debuff from everyone. It's not so much that it spread, it was that it became completely unsustainable.

this is interesting . . .i mean you can study a "disease" contagiousness on real people without anyone really getting hurt

clever

Kheldar,
It may be that taking such "life-like" models, such as disease spreading as being "serious study" might have just occured to someone. When it happened in the Everquest 2 situation, it probably didn't come to anyone's mind that this might be an interesting way to study, even at a low level, the social effects of disease spreading. It may not be very scientific regarding the disease itself, but the social aspects are quite interesting.

Nightwng2000
NW2K Software

WoW has a higher public profile is all, Kheldar.

Well, when the next pandemic breaks out all we need is a host of shamans spamming disease cleansing totem and we'll be ok...

I don't think behaviour in a game can really correlate with real life on this kind of issue.

In-game response: wow, cool - let's see how many people we can kill!

I'd very much hope the real life response would not be that...

(first?)

It works as one thing to study though. It wasn't completely predictable. Yeah, there is some generally predictable behavior of WoW players, but not completely. You can't be completely sure of the exact movements at what times. Then there are the people who try to avoid it at all costs. For that matter, the NPCs would emulate the carriers who were themselves immune.

We can NEVER have a hypothetical model that's perfect. No matter WHAT we do, there's always an element of people knowing it's fake. And there are always unpredictable actions and circumstances. All we can do is study anything relevant and prepare as best we can.

-Mike Schwinger

WoW AIDS! I remember WoW AIDS. It seems like only yesterday...

my guess is they more likely want to study how people would react to a quarantine area ( if i may site my earlier post) not all humans are as intelligent as we wish

@The wombat

for the record that wasnt meant to come out as harsh as it sounded

[...] Ashes, We All Fall Down: Scientists Studying Warcraft Plague Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down: Scientists Studying Warcraft Plague: “ A couple of sources (notably Wonderland and GamePolitics) have taken note that aforthcoming paper in The Lancet Infectious Diseases will be taking a look at the World of Warcraft ‘Corrupted Blood’ plague of 2005. Their purpose? To see how virtual models of epidemics can help real-world research - and they got the perfect case in the WoW plague. Eric Lofgren (Rutgers University) and Nina Fefferman (Tufts University), the two researchers who worked on the paper, say in their abstract: Simulation models are of increasing importance within the field of applied epidemiology. However, very little can be done to validate such models or to tailor their use to incorporate important human behaviours. In a recent incident in the virtual world of online gaming, the accidental inclusion of a disease-like phenomenon provided an excellent example of the potential of such systems to alleviate these modelling constraints. We discuss this incident and how appropriate exploitation of these gaming systems could greatly advance the capabilities of applied simulation modelling in infectious disease research. [...]

[...] When a virtual viral epidemic is out of control, what would a population of gamers react? [...]

Kingdom of Loathing did something similar. It was called the "Gray Plague" and it infected 75% of the in game population at one point.