Guest posting by David Lam
Imagine yourself at home, flipping through TV channels. The words ‘BREAKING NEWS’ flies across your screen in blaring scarlet letters. The reporter breaks the news on a case of “ataxic neurodegenerative satiency deficiency syndrome” in Florida. You chalk it up to just another health scare; after all, the media loves to report a new raging pandemic every couple months. The next week, you hear alarming stories about cases popping up every which way, including your own city. With a sigh, you retrieve a metal trunk from your closet labeled ‘Emergency Supplies.’ Who would have thought that buying a Zombie Apocalypse preparedness kit would come in handy?
We have all seen movies, books, or video games with the premise of brain-eating zombies taking over. Pop culture is infatuated with contagious disease outbreaks and zombie invasions. However, these scenarios are not limited to the entertainment industry; they can be applied to the context of health and pandemic simulation!
Broken down, zombie invasions exemplify a highly severe disease that exponentially scales in infectiousness. While real-world pandemics may not express in such a ghastly manner, health experts can use zombies to model comparable scenarios.
Using zombies to model a pandemic? Where could we find a sample size big enough to do that? Also, exposing millions of people to a highly infectious and deadly disease is undeniably unethical.
A possible solution to these problems presents itself in the game World of Warcraft. WoW is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game where participants immerse themselves in an alternate universe, with the ability to interact with other players in an open-world setting. In 2005, the game developers created an in-game virus intended for use within a particular section of the game. However the virus, in what is now infamously referred to as the Corrupted Blood Plague, escaped the confines of the original design and spread to the rest of the world. In essence, this acted as a virtual simulation of a zombie apocalypse involving real players.
The results were staggering. At the time, World of Warcraft boasted an active base of 6.5 million users. When infected players traveled to population-dense areas, entire towns succumbed to the plague. Even AI-controlled NPCs appeared to be dead. Non-player characters, such as store vendors, service providers, and guards, act as the infrastructure of the WoW universe. When stronger, higher-leveled players carried the disease to areas where many low-leveled players converged, the effects were even more devastating, affecting them much more quickly than the rest of the population. The game developers attempted to impose quarantine on infected players, but the effort failed due to lack of cooperation from the player base. Ultimately, developers had to perform a hard reset of the game’s servers.
What does this mean for health experts? Virtual world games such as World of Warcraft can be used as a tool to simulate public responses to pandemics, natural disasters, and zombie apocalypses. In the Corrupted Blood Plague incident, the unexpected loss of infrastructural elements had an impact on players, much like how losing essential services would create disturbances in real-life situations. The player level and strength disparity in World of Warcraft could also be applied to reality, reflecting real-world disadvantaged communities with less access to disaster preparedness resources or public health infrastructure. Additionally, the failed quarantine imposed by game developers demonstrates the difficulty and unexpected obstacles that come with enacted solutions to a crisis. The human ‘stupid factor,’ or tendency for individuals to act in a way detrimental to their and society’s well-being, is difficult to anticipate without the involvement of real people in a simulation.
This idea of using video games and related virtual world technology to simulate real-world health scenarios does not stand without criticism and potential fallibility. In video games where players have multiple lives, the displayed behavior may not reflect what would occur in real life. Furthermore, the primary purpose of a video game to supply entertainment may limit their utility in studying pandemics.
Despite the obstacles, the rise and advancement of virtual reality technology (e.g. Oculus Rift, Project Morpheus) may improve the utility of virtual worlds and video games in pandemic and health behavior simulation. With some creative thinking, health researchers could create a new tool in their arsenal to more accurately simulate real-life scenarios.
Sources:
http://www.webcitation.org/5tbBziZ2y
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2009/05/what-can-world-of-warcraft-teach-us-about-pandemic-response.html
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/33276/gdc_2011_an_epidemiologists_view_.php
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2008/10/the-many-nuisances-of-a-zombie-apocalypse
http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/zombies.htm
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18571