This one comes from a virtual world which is, surprisingly enough, not Second Life. Science may be leveraging virtual behavior patterns to model real world problems. In this case, they want to use a digital disease in the MMORPG World of Warcraft to learn more about how things would spread in the real world.

Computer Virus

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, this idea spawned from a patch the creators of WoW introduced for a disease called “corrupted blood”. It was designed to affect a small subset of players, but instead managed to spread wildly. Carriers were infecting defenseless avatars and chaos was spreading as people tried to protect their characters from infection. In the end, Blizzard was forced to “turn off” the disease.

This type of fear closely models how people would react to a contagious disease in the real world, and scientists were quick to note this. The idea is that since players have invested so much effort into creating these characters, the thought of having them crippled by disease is similar to the thought of contracting something like the “bird flu” or malaria. While it is certainly not a perfect proxy, it’s quite a bit better than the purely mathematical models that scientists typically use.

Web 2.0 Roundup

It’ll be interesting to see how this experiment develops. This just goes to show that the real power of virtual worlds is not only in the fun they provide for users but also the power of getting large numbers of real human beings to interact in the same space. Will this data prove useful, only time will tell. Sound off here.

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