Following up on my, ah, ‘experience’ with Second Life, an alert reader (ok, my techie son) sent me this Economist story about the owners of “World of Warcraft” accidentally introducing a plague into this “cod-medieval” online game. Unfortunately the plague was more virulent than they expected — as is often the case in medieval times — and it moved from a sparsely inhabited area to the cities, where it “wreaked havoc”.
This little virtual catastrophe caught the attention of Lofgren and Nina Fefferman, two epidemiologists at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who studied the players reactions and wrote about it in Lancet: Infectious Diseases. According to the Economist story, the authors were also taken a little aback.
“One surprise was that players put themselves into risky situations more often than epidemiologists allow for in their models. An unexpectedly large fraction of players acted altruistically to protect their weaker friends. On the other hand, a significant number seemed intent on infecting as many other characters as possible — behavior reminiscent of a small minority of people with AIDS. There was also a lot of dangerous curiosity, as players who were off-line when the plague began started logging on only in order to find out what was happening, and thus risked the deaths of their characters.”
In their Lancet abstract the authors said “the accidental inclusion of a disease-like phenomenon showed how such systems could be used to incorporate important human behaviors into epidemiological models.”
But for those of you worried about those virtual malcontents intent on infecting other characters, have no fear, China’s new virtual police are here. I am not kidding. Starting September 1st, these virtual cartoon cops will begin patrolling “all thirteen Internet portals in Beijing. Every half hour, these male or female cyber cops will show up on the websites and readers can click on them to report any ‘illegal information’ they see.”
So problem solved. Right.
What we see here is a strange virtual/real mash up that is better than fiction. You just can’t make this stuff up.
