The online role-playing game World of Warcraft turns 20 years old. The world of video games has significantly changed the MMORPG WoW. But one incident was so large that it even had an impact on the real world.
What kind of bug was it? In 2005, the final boss in the then-popular WoW raid Zul’Gurub, Hakkar, had a special ability: He would apply the “Corrupted Blood” to players, which would then spread to other players and slowly kill them irrevocably. The Corrupted Blood was a timer: “Kill the boss before the plague kills you all.”
However, what Blizzard did not foresee was that players could take this plague from the raid into the open world of WoW.
Once unleashed into the free world, the plague spread further and claimed tens of thousands of players across all servers. The capitals were full of thousands of players who were all suffering from the Corrupted Blood.
Researchers studied Corrupted Blood in WoW
How did this affect the real world? As early as 2007, researchers recognized how valuable the WoW plague was, for although this plague occurred only virtually, scientists could draw insights from it about how a crowd or society would behave when confronted with a real pandemic.
The data that scientists collected over the years while analyzing the WoW plague became useful in 2020, when the coronavirus evolved into a global pandemic.
In a lengthy report from PC Gamer, scientists like Dr. Eric Lofgren (Washington State University) explained how their years of study of the plague now impacted their research on social behavior regarding the coronavirus:
For me, this was a good example of how important it is to understand human behavior. How people respond to public health emergencies and how these responses truly influence the course of events. We often see epidemics as something that just happens to people. There is a virus that causes problems.
But in reality, it is a virus that spreads among people, and how people interact and behave, and whether they obey authorities or not – these are all very important things. And also, that these things are very chaotic. You can’t really predict: “Oh yes, everyone will go into quarantine. It’ll be fine.”
People thought: In the real world, people would be more sensible
Lofgren also explains: In WoW, they observed the phenomenon of “griefing”, where people would deliberately and maliciously infect others. Critics claimed that nobody would ever do that in the real world:
They might not make people deliberately sick, but willfully ignoring the danger of making others sick comes pretty close. There are people who say: “Oh, it’s not a big deal, I’m not going to change my behavior. I’m going to the concert and then visiting my old grandma.” Maybe one shouldn’t do that. That’s an important realization. Epidemics are a social problem … Downplaying the seriousness of a situation is a kind of real griefing.
The Corrupted Blood is still one of the most important events in WoW almost 20 years after its outbreak, and other games like Star Wars: The Old Republic found the implications of the bug so intriguing that they introduced their own plague into the MMORPG. Blizzard itself immortalized the Corrupted Blood years later in a card in Hearthstone: How an ancient WoW plague rapidly infected Hearthstone
