A second look at Hakkar's Corrupted Blood
by Amanda Rivera 
Oct 2nd 2007 at 5:02PM
Terra Nova is rethinking the conclusions the BBC made a while back about using WoW to study the spread of diseases. If you recall the article stated that player's reactions to the spread of Hakkar's Corrupted Blood was an excellent research tool for how epidemics spread in the real world. Not so says Dan Hunter.
All of this discussion stems from a spell called Corrupted Blood that infects players fighting Hakkar in Zul'Gurub. In some cases players took the disease back with them to Ironforge and Ogrimmar, and death spread amongst the populace of those cities. Dan argues against the BBC claim that we can study diseases within online games to find out how real epidemics would spread.
I see his point really. First, there is the nature of the spell itself, created as a game mechanic, not as a virus with incubation periods and deteriorating illnesses that ultimately lead to a victim's demise. There is nothing within WoW to show the ultimate toll on a population when they must live with an illness for long periods of time, where they cannot log out and go watch a movie instead. Once Corrupted Blood had spread it was over with, there was no need for quarantine, for the development of an antivirus, of really any of those elements that make dealing with a large scale deadly disease so horrific.
The reactions of the players to the debuff, their running around to either help or hurt their fellow players, is really an illustration of social behavior in online games, says Hunter. If we study this at all, we should do it from the context of social science rather than epidemiology. In order to truly study viruses in an online virtual world, we would need to create such a world specifically for that purpose a massively multiplayer online roleplaying scenario in which few would participate because there is nothing fun about disease. In such a scenario, players would not be able to simply remove themselves from the game in order to avoid the plague, otherwise there could be no real research into the behavior of the virus.
I see the value in such a project, and would gladly participate, but I can't foresee anyone with the research funding substantial enough to accomplish this spending it on what would be essentially termed a game. Unless of course a company like Blizzard donates their resources to the creation of such a project.
All of this discussion stems from a spell called Corrupted Blood that infects players fighting Hakkar in Zul'Gurub. In some cases players took the disease back with them to Ironforge and Ogrimmar, and death spread amongst the populace of those cities. Dan argues against the BBC claim that we can study diseases within online games to find out how real epidemics would spread.
I see his point really. First, there is the nature of the spell itself, created as a game mechanic, not as a virus with incubation periods and deteriorating illnesses that ultimately lead to a victim's demise. There is nothing within WoW to show the ultimate toll on a population when they must live with an illness for long periods of time, where they cannot log out and go watch a movie instead. Once Corrupted Blood had spread it was over with, there was no need for quarantine, for the development of an antivirus, of really any of those elements that make dealing with a large scale deadly disease so horrific.
The reactions of the players to the debuff, their running around to either help or hurt their fellow players, is really an illustration of social behavior in online games, says Hunter. If we study this at all, we should do it from the context of social science rather than epidemiology. In order to truly study viruses in an online virtual world, we would need to create such a world specifically for that purpose a massively multiplayer online roleplaying scenario in which few would participate because there is nothing fun about disease. In such a scenario, players would not be able to simply remove themselves from the game in order to avoid the plague, otherwise there could be no real research into the behavior of the virus.
I see the value in such a project, and would gladly participate, but I can't foresee anyone with the research funding substantial enough to accomplish this spending it on what would be essentially termed a game. Unless of course a company like Blizzard donates their resources to the creation of such a project.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Doffencrag Oct 2nd 2007 5:11PM
Ooo... you shouldn't have put that last sentence. You're gonna attract a lot of QQers complaining about how Blizz is not doing enough for them. LOL.
Valid points though. It may not be right for researching into outbreaks, but maybe MMORPGs can definitely be used to measure other things. I think it's a powerful tool, just waiting for the right use.
Dipstick Oct 2nd 2007 5:14PM
Such an experiment might be interesting but would ultimately be criticised profusely for not being realistic enough. If a virus like Corrupted Blood got into any of our cities (think Ebola), people would scatter to the winds or isolate themselves. Although arguably the good souls among medics might seek to help others at their own risk.
People don't die in WoW, they just corpserun.
Terrant Oct 2nd 2007 5:29PM
I think virtual models could be very interesting as exploratory research - trying to capture the range of possible reactions to the introduction of a condition (in this case, an easily transmissible disease) - but would be unreliable for making definitive conclusions.
Zoidberg Oct 2nd 2007 6:15PM
It would certainly be difficult to simulate a real disease outbreak. However, you might be able to measure some behaviors during an outbreak. The BBC pointed out that current epidemiology simulations don't have good models for human behavior. Trying to measure how they might behave might be possible.
Then again, real humans have a strong tendency to do the right thing. That is, I suspect there will be few people who have caught a real disease who run around through population centers trying to infect as many people as possible. This desire to do the right thing is largely absent in online communities where the rules of behavior aren't as strong.
onetrueping Oct 2nd 2007 6:25PM
Zoidberg, I hate to disagree with you, but... have you heard of Typhoid Mary?
Essentially, in every infected population, there are a few people who become irrationally angry about their situation, and who will deliberately move around and spread disease. This ranges from those people who have HIV and try to spread it around as much as possible (especially prevalent in Africa with it's low ability to enforce laws) even to the extent of raping women to do so, to people who are carriers of a disease and spread it to everyone around them, as in the Typhus epidemic.
Typhoid Mary was a girl who carried the disease, and whenever it began to spread about wherever she was, she moved to another town and started another job. Such things are hard to trace, and can spread disease around like nobody's business. Don't underestimate how malicious or desperate people can get, hm?
Rizel Oct 2nd 2007 6:58PM
I don't think a game can tell you the actual behavior of people because I would "infect" people just for the heck of it.
But in real I wouldn't and it's quite logical that sick minded people would do it in real, especially if they are the lower-ranked people in society what else would please them more than making rich people sick to death.
Obiter Oct 2nd 2007 7:01PM
Part of the value of the WoW experiment was precisely its randomness. When disease strikes without warning, the chief public health management problem is panic, and people acting irrationally as result of it. When you talk about creating "games" specifically to study disease, and include wiling player agents of study, they will play it like a game, ie., like rational actors seeking to maximize their interests. That's not how it works in the real world. People lose their mind, get scared, and start doing stupid things. The Hakkar Outbreak is interesting because it shows how populations react to something devastating and completely unexpectedly (including by chosing to login or not, as if someone slowing down to observe a car wreck!), and not because it happens to factually correspond to any particular real-world disease. That is still an epidemiological issue, not necessarily one of "social science."
Furthermore, you are quite wrong about the availability of virtual world software as a research tool. There are now quite a few virtual world software packages available for very reasonable prices (or free!) that would easily allow someone to model a smallish population. There are also groups of academics like the Arden Institute that are actively using virtual worlds to study real-world issues of all kinds.
Alex Oct 2nd 2007 7:41PM
Yeah..so Terra Nova, and you, both completely missed the point. Do you think this is the first time someone has thought about virtually modeling disease spread? Hundreds of models to do this exist, SIR being one of the simplest and most popular. There's an entire field of applied mathematics that does nothing but model these events. The point is that they wanted to use the virtual world to gather human behavior data, to see if it can aid them in that one aspect of the modeling - most models today are statistically based, that is, they'll know that randomly 1 in x number of people will be a Typhoid Mary - but it doesn't analyze WHY this occurs. That's what they're getting at with this, and it's still an excellent idea. Honestly, don't you think that the real scientists might know a BIT more about this than someone who writes wow blogs?
freehugz Oct 2nd 2007 9:24PM
lol @ using wow to model normal human behavior
Greg Oct 3rd 2007 11:53AM
@5
Typhoid Mary didn't deliberately spread typhoid. She was a generally healthy woman, and didn't believe she was a carrier of typhoid fever, as that concept was little known or believed at that time. I recommend checking out Wikipedia's entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoid_Mary as well doing a little research in other places to confirm their information.
Please don't spread misinformation if you can help it.
Krianna Oct 3rd 2007 12:48AM
onetrueping -- Typhoid Mary thought she was "helping." She was deranged, not malicious.
ericcst Oct 3rd 2007 9:53PM
Well said, Alex.