LordIllidan
08-22-2007, 09:28 PM
I found this on Ars Technica. I thought it was pretty interesting:
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.
What do you guys think? Should they be allowed to do this, or not?
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.
What do you guys think? Should they be allowed to do this, or not?