Researchers studied a virtual plague in the MMORPG World of Warcraft 13 years ago. They say the insights from back then help them better understand the current coronavirus. Epidemics have a social aspect.
What was that plague in WoW? In 2005, there was a special end boss in the WoW raid Zul’Gurub: Hakkar. He could inflict players with a blood plague that spread to other players and decimated them. This was a boss mechanic that was meant to work only within that raid: a kind of “countdown.”
But players could carry this plague out of the raid into the open world. There they infected others with the plague, the newly infected spread the blood plague further, and characters died from it. Especially in major cities like Orgrimmar, tens of thousands of players were affected by the plague.
Researchers wrote about WoW plague in 2007
These parallels were already noted in 2007: This virtual epidemic in World of Warcraft became a subject of research in the following years. In 2007, researchers Nina Fefferman and Eric Lofgren wrote an article about what scientific insights can be drawn from the WoW plague.
The researchers observed at the time that the plague spread rapidly in densely populated metropolises and caused high mortality. But especially the “social chaos” was significant.
In 2007, a parallel to “real-world pandemics” was already seen in the course of the WoW plague:
- The virus started in a small area of relatively low interest
- It then became an uncontrolled plague that affected millions of Americans, Asians, and Europeans at home
The researchers examined how players behaved:
- There were “helpers” who wanted to heal plague victims, got infected with the blood plague themselves, and passed the virus on
- “Griefers” would intentionally infect themselves to deliberately spread the plague
The researchers stated at the time that the event was “unexpected,” a “black swan.”
Lofgren compared the virus at the time to influenza and stated that on many servers, the infections were so severe that the major cities had to be abandoned. Trade came to a standstill. Entire cities were essentially uninhabitable.
There are also griefers in the real world
This is what the researchers are saying today: PC Gamer interviewed the two authors of the paper from back then, Dr. Nina Fefferman and Dr. Eric Lofgren, about what parallels they see to the current virus Covid-19, the coronavirus.
Lofgren stated that the WoW virus helped him understand how people behave in a medical crisis. It’s important how people interact with one another. Whether they adhere to government regulations or not. All these things are chaotic. One cannot assume that everyone simply accepts being in quarantine.
At that time it was criticized: The comparison of the plague in WoW to a normal virus was flawed because there are no “griefers” in the real world who deliberately catch the virus. But people who act recklessly and do not protect themselves are quite close to being griefers, says Lofgren.
People start to say: “Oh, it’s not a big deal for me. I won’t change my behavior. I’ll go to the concert and visit my elderly grandmother anyway.”
Maybe don’t do that. That’s the important insight. Epidemics are a social system. Downplaying the seriousness of something is a form of real-world griefing.
Dr. Eric Lofgren
Dr. Nina Feffermann, the co-author of the study on Corrupted Blood, also says that the work back then helps her now understand the social side of an epidemic. She has worked hard since then to develop models that represent risk perception. In this, her work on the plague in WoW has helped her.
Fefferman believes her work is now easier because she invested time back then in following the discussions of WoW players about the blood plague and examining how they reacted in real-time to these discussions.
The way players talked about the plague in WoW back then does not reflect now: The same way is now how Covid-19 is being discussed on social media.
- Currently, WoW Classic is bringing us back to the MMORPG from 2005. Zul’Gurub and the Blood God Hakkar are about to become active.
- A current game that is quite close to a pandemic scenario is The Division 2. It captures the social chaos of a deadly, rapidly spreading plague.
