How Did World of Warcraft Help With The COVID-19 Pandemic?
An unforeseen event occurred in 2005 that caused a widespread plague to infect the players causing widespread virtual character deaths. The plague that was caused by a disease called The Corrupted Blood.
What is World of Warcraft?
World of Warcraft (WoW) was released in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment. WoW has become one of the most popular multiplayer online role-playing game, it had a player count of 10 million in 2009 and grossed over $9.23 billion in revenue by 2017.
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Corrupted Blood
On 13th September 2005, the developer Blizzard released a new expansion pack that granted millions of players access to Zul’Gurub, a new area intended for gamers with powerful characters. At the heart of this new section was a duel with a winged serpent called Hakkar. This serpent could infect the player’s character with a disease called Corrupted Blood, which can also be passed on to other nearby characters.
Unsuccessful players would fast travel to another city to be healed while being infected with Corrupted Blood. This allowed players to carry the virus into mass population centres before they died or were healed. Other factors would cause new outbreaks, the first was that in-game pets could be infected. Players would put them in suspended animation before or during fights to protect them. However, when the pets were brought back from suspended animation a new outbreak would occur. The second factor was non-playable characters like shopkeepers, who were impossible to kill, could carry the virus so they were super-spreaders in the game. Corrupted Blood soon became a full-blown pandemic killing large numbers of low-level players.
How Did Players React?
As cities within the game started to pile up with dead bodies, players would escape the cities and go into smaller towns and villages. Unknown to the players spreading the virus even more. Players would invoke quarantines around cities to stop the spread, however, quarantines would be breached and the spread of the disease continued. Players that have died would respawn in cities but they would get re-infected so they would start another spread. High-level players that can endure the infection would go into infected cities healing and trying to cure low-level players that have contracted the disease. Some would set up a healing station while other some would rush into highly impacted areas to help. However, in doing so they would become infected themselves and become hosts of the virus. Other players would continue to do jobs in the game and earn coins. Players would then make a transaction to buy loot and then would infect others around them. They would also infect non-playable players that would operate the stores for players to buy loot. These non-players would not show any symptoms and couldn’t die but can carry the disease therefore would infect players that visit them. Players operated a system to flag themselves if infected and quarantine themselves; some players would purposely infect others which broke down this flagging system.
How Did They Stop Corrupted Blood Pandemic?
Unlike in real life, players can respawn and get re-infected which meant that the disease could keep going on forever. In the end, Blizzard had to reset the servers and patch the game to ensure that the Corrupted Blood can only infect players and non-playable characters and pets don’t get infected.
What Did Academics Learn From This?
Even though this is a virtual scenario and players can respawn, academics learnt a lot from this situation. Academics and scientists can see how people would react in a pandemic without the loss of real life. They are also aware that the scenario was played in a game environment so it's not a perfect real-life simulation. If they consider high-level players as healthy adults and low-level players as the vulnerable population such as the elderly and young children they can learn a lot on how to deal with a pandemic. Low-level players (vulnerable population) were flagged and quarantined within a city and the high-level players (healthy adults) helped the low-level players to cure them. The non-playable characters can be seen as the asymptomatic population that carry the virus but do not show symptoms. The erratic behaviours of certain players can be the minority population who may not obey rules and how they continue the spread of the virus and how they break down methods of prevention. A lot was learnt that academics have postes a paper on the virtual simulation.
How Does This Relate To COVID-19 Pandemic?
Many similarities of what was implemented in the Corrupted Blood pandemic within WoW can be seen within the COVID-19 pandemic we see today. Today we see lockdowns (quarantines) being implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. We see the vulnerable isolating while healthy populations continue as normal and aid the vulnerable with food shops and other tasks. We see individuals breaking quarantine or lockdown, thereby spreading it locally and across county borders. Today we have to cope with the fact that there are individuals that could have the virus but not show symptoms. A lot of what was learnt in WoW has been analysed and implemented in today’s COVID-19 pandemic.
Could More Virtual Simulations Happen Within Games?
The accidental simulation of a pandemic within WoW has shown the scientists and health organisations the benefits of using virtual simulations, especially when the participants do not know if a simulation is occurring. Teaming up with game developers to implement real-life scenarios could provide insight into human behaviours and how future scenarios could be handled.