Following a bug in the video game World of Warcraft, an uncontrolled contagious disease caused an uncontrolled slaughter in this online universe, and was an interesting experiment on epidemics.

How It Started ?

In 2005, World of Warcraft decided to add a new boss named Hakkar to the game. This enemy had the capacity to throw a spell called “Corrupted Blood”. This spell was normally a contagious spell that could only operate inside the dungeon. But the developers hadn’t planned that the pets of the players would be healthy carriers. So they could get out of the dungeons carrying the spell (inside their pets) without even knowing it. But when they went to the cities, with their pets, they became contaminating. Unfortunately this spell was too strong against weak players and they could die in a few seconds. That’s how the spell started spreading in the game. And just a few hours later the ground was littered with dead bodies.

How Did People React ?

There were a lot of different reactions from the players. Some of them, the weakest, started running out of the cities to avoid being contaminated by other players. Others that were more altruistic helped people by healing them but risking their own lives. Finally some of them helped spread the spell, in running to everyone because they were stronger or just because they were curious about this situation and wanted to know more about it.

How Do Developers Avoid It?

First, they tried to control the propagation with quarantines all around the world but players could easily travel across countries so it didn’t go as planned. So to prevent more damage, the developers created a potion that could heal a person but unfortunately it was really expensive on certain servers.

That’s why they only had 2 choices left.

• they could look at any pets and if it was contaminated, they healed it.
• they could make a program that checks if a pet is contaminated by the corrupted blood every time he’s invoked.

They chose the second option but it took 1 month before the update was available.

Conclusion

As we can see, all the strategies to combat the spread of the virus (quarantine, vaccine, etc) of the pandemic in World of Warcraft are really close to what happened when the virus Sars-Cov-2 appeared. After this online pandemic, some scientists such as Dr Nina FEFFERMAN worked on the subject and studied how players reacted. She assessed that there was something no scientist had thought of when making a simulation of a pandemic: the sometimes inappropriate behavior of individuals in the face of a serious and unprecedented global health situation.

With the example of World of Warcraft, we can clearly see that a video-game can help us understand some human comportments and study some pandemic-like situations. In the future, maybe we will see some new games with the objective of being studied by scientists to make simulations of their hypotheses.

References

• World of Warcraft experienced a pandemic in 2005. That experience may help coronavirus researchers - WashingtonPost.Com
• Wuhan coronavirus prompts netizens to study World of Warcraft epidemic - SCMP.Com
• Corrupted Blood Incident - Wikipedia
• «Sang corrompu», le virus inopiné responsable du premier confinement numérique de World of Warcraft - LeFigaro.Fr
• World Of Warcraft, Official website