When developers at Blizzard created the game, they wouldn’t have thought that World of Warcraft would be used by scientists! According to a BBC story, the ‘corrupted blood’ disease that spread within World of Warcraft can offer insights into real life epidemics.
Professor Nina Fefferman is a researcher from Tufts University School of Medicine. She said, “Human behavior has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behavior. The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game.”
Though Fefferman indicated that as the disease spread in the virtual world, people might have behaved in a riskier manner, but the estimations can be used for drawing conclusions. Her views are echoed by Dr Gary Smith, who happens to be the professor of Population Biology and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been working on modeling infectious diseases.
Smith says, “Very few mathematical models of disease transmission take host behavior into account. Although the characteristics of the disease could be defined before hand, once released into the virtual world, the study is just as ‘observational’ as disease outbreak studies in the real world. Nevertheless, I suppose one could argue that the proposal describes an opportunity for study that we might not otherwise have.”
Well, it is a great thing that the online gaming worlds can be used to research such topics. Who knows, they could use it to prevent future outbreak of contagious diseases or even find clues about diseases likes AIDS.