World of Warcraft... in The Lancet

Gumby Brain Specialist: Where's the bloody Lancet?

And now for something completely different...

The online multiplayer game World of Warcraft... in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics

Eric T Lofgren and Prof Nina H Fefferman
The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Volume 7, Issue 9, September 2007, Pages 625-629
doi:10.1016/S1473-3099(07)70212-8

New game content for World of Warcraft is issued via a series of patches, released every 1 or 2 months. Patch 1.7, released on Sept 13, 2005, contained access to an area known as “Zul'Gurub”, which was intended for use by players whose characters had achieved a sufficient level within the game to be considered “relatively powerful”. The centrepiece of this area was a combative encounter with a powerful creature called “Hakkar” (figure 2). Occasionally, one of the players facing this massive winged serpent would be purposefully infected by a disease called “Corrupted Blood”. This infection, as intended, then rapidly began infecting other nearby players. To the powerful players who were battling Hakkar, the infection was just a hindrance, designed to make this particular combat more challenging. However, several aspects of the disease caused this minor inconvenience to blossom into an uncontrolled game-wide epidemic. The ability of many characters to transport themselves instantly from one location to another was the first factor in the game that unexpectedly set the stage for the plague. This type of travel is frequently used to return to the capital cities of the game's geography from more remote regions for reasons of game play. Many victims of Corrupted Blood thus reached heavily populated areas before either being killed by or cured of the disease, mimicking the travel of contagious carriers over long distances that has been the hallmark of many disease outbreaks in history—eg, the Mongol horde and the bubonic plague, or the cholera outbreaks of Europe during the mid-19th century. The highly contagious disease then spread to other players outside the intended, localised combat area near Hakkar.

Story widely reported today.

UPDATE: Also see

Modeling Infectious Diseases Dissemination Through Online Role-Playing Games.

Virtual Epidemiology
Epidemiology. 18(2):260-261, March 2007.
Balicer, Ran D.

via ArsTechnica
via Steve

ENDUPDATE