Cause and effect: Gaming mimics reality of plague
5/8/2009
Well, a digital pandemic disease survivor, anyway.
Back in the dark days of September 2005, I witnessed firsthand the "Corrupted Blood" plague as it swept through the World of Warcraft online video game, leaving cities wiped out and players hiding in fear for their virtual lives.
Other than being frustrated and annoyed, most of us gamers didn't think all that much of it at the time, but it turns out that understanding the digital plague could help scientist track a real outbreak.
Using a game to look at how a modern disease like swine flu might spread sounds a bit silly on the surface — but scientists have already written a few papers about it, including one in The Lancet back in 2007, because behavior of people in the game can hint at how real people might act in a pandemic.
The Warcraft outbreak started as a damaging disease that was, supposedly, aimed at hurting only high-level players. It was spread by a monster called "Hakkar the Soulflayer" in a dungeon where only the strongest characters could survive.
But because those players traveled easily through the game, from town to town and city to city, and because the disease was highly contagious, something happened that the creators of Warcraft did not intend.
The plague spread to lower level characters all over the virtual world, and it killed millions.
Soon after, developers tried to set up quarantine zones to stop it, but until they took more drastic action, the outbreak continued to spread.
And just like in a real outbreak, people had very different reactions to the growing threat.
Some, upon hearing about the possibility of continuous virtual death, just plain left their computers off for the few days that the plague ravaged the world — sort of like the gamer version of hiding in a well-equipped bunker.
Others logged on and promptly tried to escape to less populated areas, so they could still play despite the infection risk. In the process, though, they sometimes brought the plague with them.
Some tried to help and heal infected players so they could keep playing, especially if they played in the same family, like groups called guilds.
I remember logging on to my healer, a low-level character, at that time to help a guild member out. I got a heal off on him, got about two off on me, and then died from the exposure.
Higher level healers ended up for the most part just prolonging the suffering so that infected gamers would spread the disease to even more characters before they died.
And then of course, there was the 14-year-old contingent — the kids who purposefully got their high-level characters infected and then ran around the virtual world, trying to infect everybody they could.
What's interesting about all of this is that in computer models of disasters or disease outbreaks, like those at Los Alamos National Laboratory, programmers try to get their digital people to react in the same way that real people do.
In the game, though, the digital people were all actually played by real people, which in some ways can point to behavior we could expect in a pandemic.
Except, I hope, for the 14-year-old contingent. Unless you exchange them for bitter, dying and slightly unbalanced people who might actually try to infect others in a real pandemic.
In another flashback to computer phenomena of the past, I also recently read that scientists are looking at data from the "Where's George" Web site, www.wheresgeorge.com, to see how human-to-human transmission might work in a pandemic.
That site, which has been around for about 10 years, lets people enter serial numbers for dollar bills, and then tracks those bills around the globe.
Scientists have been looking at that tracking information to see how human contact might send a disease through various communities — in much the same way that a dollar might move from store to store in a city, eventually perhaps moving on to another place or town when somebody travels.
It's odd, yet fascinating, that the digital world could end up being a more accurate model for disease outcomes than some of the best purely mathematical ones. But then again, people have always been more unpredictable than any purely scientific model can comprehend.
And so far, at least, swine flu hasn't been nearly as dangerous as the plague that blasted through Warcraft. With a little luck, it will stay that way, but if not, it's nice to have some more detailed notions about what people would actually do — no matter where the information comes from.
One thing's for sure — if swine flu does mutate and become more deadly this fall, health officials won't be able to fix it the way Warcraft's developers did.
Because in the end, the developers just shut down all the servers, removed the disease and rebooted. Problem solved.
But at least with some months to develop a strategy, the science and health communities have a little time to learn lessons from other environments, and perhaps use that to reduce the damage.
As we say in the gaming world — woot!
Sue Vorenberg has been a gamer since the 1970s, and loves the idea that games have many more benefits than most people think. Contact her at svorenberg@sfnewmexican.com.