My friend, Jamie Cannon, alerted me to an event that happened on the MMORPG World of Warcraft that I found extremely interesting. I’m not sure how I missed hearing about it at the time it happened, but hey, better late than never.
I’ve taken a strong interest in the application of games for purposes other than entertainment, and this event relates directly to that. In September of 2005, World of Warcraft implemented the Zul’Gurub instance. For those of you who don’t play MMOs, an instance is an area a group of players can explore privately without interference from other players. Instances tend to feature some of the game’s most difficult content, as well as its most valuable rewards. In World of Warcraft, the Zul’Gurub instance is designed for players above level 51. The maximum player level at the time this instance was implemented was level 60. Zul’Gurub has several difficult bosses (particularly difficult enemies with special abilities) for players to battle. Arguably the most challenging of these bosses is Hakkar the Soulflayer.
When fighting Hakkar, players are affected by a condition called Corrupted Blood. This condition would last for a set amount of time and would cause between 250-300 points of damage (out of about 2500-5000 health) every couple of seconds. Any player standing near an infected player would contract the condition. To prevent Corrupted Blood from spreading outside Zul’Gurub, infected players would no longer have the condition once they left the instance. However, Corrupted Blood still found its way into major cities. Two factors contributed to this glitch. One was player pets. Certain player classes, such as hunters, have pets, which can be told to attack and use abilities by the player who controls them. If a pet contracted Corrupted Blood, was dismissed before the disease faded, and resummoned outside the instance, it would spread the condition to other players. The other contributing factor was non-player characters (NPCs). NPCs were not immune to the disease and would pass it along to players who interacted with them.
Infected players would pass the condition to other players in the cities simply by standing too close to them. Inside Zul’Gurub, all of the players were high enough levels to withstand the damage caused by Corrupted Blood without dying. However, in the cities, low level players could not withstand the damage dealt by the condition, and they were killed. The condition was removed when the infected player died or when the timer on the condition ran out.
Corrupted Blood effectively created a plague in World of Warcraft’s cities. To many players, the cities were simply uninhabitable, and they began avoiding major cities altogether. Among other things, this had an effect on the game’s player-based economy, which was largely controlled by the auction houses that could only be found in major cities. Blizzard (the developer of World of Warcraft) took measures to stop the plague, including quarantining certain areas. Ultimately, however, the only ‘cure’ for this plague was to change the mechanics of Corrupted Blood. It still causes a large amount of damage, but it no longer spreads from player to player.
Researchers have studied this glitch, applying it to real-life disease outbreaks. If scenarios such as the Corrupted Blood incident could be created in a virtual world, scientists could study people’s unpredictable reactions and better plan for a real-life disease outbreak. This possibility caused the Corrupted Blood plague to get a lot of media attention and several articles have been written on the subject, including this one by Lucy Bannerman.
Although it fascinates me, I won’t go on and on about the idea of applying MMOs as a method of studying disease outbreak. Instead, I’d like to point out that if an MMO environment can be used to simulate a disease outbreak, then why not other types of disasters? Perhaps better emergency planning could be implemented for towns located near nuclear plants if we could simulate a meltdown in an MMO environment. This could help us foresee not only the types of reactions people might have once the disaster has occurred, but the unpredictable events that can lead to a disaster in the first place. After all, Blizzard didn’t foresee that pets would spread Corrupted Blood.
Of course, the nuclear power plant meltdown is a hypothetical situation. To add some reality to my thought process, imagine if we could have somehow simulated a Category 4 hurricane hitting New Orleans before Katrina happened. How many lives would be saved if we knew that so many would be unable to evacuate in such a short amount of time? How many lives would be saved if we knew ahead of time how many would be killed if the levees failed?
This same line of thinking can be applied to hundreds of situations- September 11th, the California Wildfires, floods in West Virginia, tornadoes in the midwest…the list goes on. Corrupted Blood proved that the unforeseeable events that lead to disaster and people’s unpredictable reactions to disaster can all be simulated in a well-populated virtual world.
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