Two years ago, Blizzard Entertainment tried to add a little kick to its gaia gold virtual realm in the form of a contagious disease that infected players’ characters. The plague was meant to infect only characters strong enough to handle it, but some managed to break through quarantines. Now researchers are using the event to study human behavior during a pandemic.
In an effort to bump up game play in the online realm of its wow gold massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORP), Blizzard Entertainment two years ago introduced a new villain, known by the colorful moniker of “ the Soulf layer.”
Little did the company know that the virtual plague would spread to avatars in the online world would help epidemiologists learn a thing or two about human behavior during a pandemic.
That’s exactly what happened when began infecting players with Corrupted Blood, a virus causing an outbreak to spread through the virtual world of some 4 million players in September of 2005, according to researchers from Rutgers University and Tufts University. In fact, Nina wow gold, assistant research professor of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts and con-director of, and Eric Lofgren of Rutgers, her former student, had joked about just such an event in online gaming a few weeks before the plague actually happened.
“Players’ behavior in the game is analogous but not directly equivalent,” Feffer man told Tech News World. “The analogy just sort of made itself plain to us once we were thinking about it to begin with. And so certainly, looking at how the anecdotal reports of the disease being spread were coming in just instantly looked to us like a really normal [outbreak] hitting an urban center. And once that connection was made, everything else just fell into place.”
In the report, published in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases released Monday, Fefferman and Lofgren use the wow gold outbreak to gain insight into people’s responses during an epidemic. Ran Balicer, an Israeli researcher at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, published a similar paper in the journal Epidemiology in March.
