The Corrupted Blood incident was a video game glitch and virtual plague in the
MMORPG World of Warcraft, which began on September 13, 2005, and lasted for one
week. The epidemic began with the introduction of the new raid Zul'Gurub
and its end boss Hakkar The Soulflayer. When confronted and attacked, Hakkar
would cast a hit point-draining and highly-contagious debuff spell called
Corrupted Blood on players. The spell, intended to last only seconds
and function only within the new area of Zul'Gurub, soon spread across the
virtual world by way of a bug that allowed pets and minions to take the
affliction out of its intended confines. By both accidental and purposeful
intent, a pandemic ensued that quickly killed lower-level characters and
annoyed higher-leveled ones, drastically changing normal gameplay, as players did
what they could to avoid infection. Despite measures such as
programmer-imposed quarantines, and the players' abandoning of densely populated
cities, the epidemic was finally controlled with a combination of patches
and resets of the virtual world. The conditions and reactions of the
event attracted the attention of epidemiologists for its implications of
how human populations could react to a real-world epidemic. Anti-terrorism
officials also took notice of the event, noting the implications of some players
planning and perpetrating a virtual biological attack.
History The epidemic began on September 13,
2005, when Blizzard introduced a new raid called Zul'Gurub into the game as
part of a new update. Its end boss, Hakkar, could affect players by using a
debuff called Corrupted Blood, a disease that damages players over time, this one
specifically doing significant damage. The disease could be passed on between
any nearby characters, and would kill characters with lower levels in a few
seconds, while higher level characters could keep themselves alive. It would
disappear as time passed or when the character died. Due to a programming
error, players' pets and minions carried the disease out of the raid.
Non-player characters could contract the disease but were asymptomatic to it and
could spread it to others. At least three of the game's servers were
affected. The difficulty in killing Hakkar may have limited the spread of
the disease. Discussion forum posters described seeing hundreds of bodies
lying in the streets of the towns and cities. Deaths in World of Warcraft are
not permanent, as characters are resurrected shortly afterward. However,
dying in such a way is disadvantageous to the player's character and incurs
inconvenience. During the epidemic, normal gameplay was
disrupted. Player responses varied but resembled real-world behaviors. Some
characters with healing abilities volunteered their services, some
lower-level characters who could not help would direct people away from
infected areas, some characters would flee to uninfected areas, and some
characters attempted to spread the disease to others. Players in the game
reacted to the disease as if there was real risk to their well-being. Blizzard
Entertainment attempted to institute a voluntary quarantine to stem the
disease, but it failed, as some players didn't take it seriously, while others
took advantage of the pandemonium. Despite certain security measures,
players overcame them by giving the disease to summonable pets. Blizzard was
forced to fix the problem by instituting hard resets of the servers and applying
quick fixes. The major towns and cities were
abandoned by the population as panic set in and players rushed to evacuate to the
relative safety of the countryside, leaving urban areas filled to the brim
with corpses, and the city streets literally white with the bones of the
dead. = Reaction =
At the time, World of Warcraft had more than two million players all over the
world. Before Blizzard Entertainment commented on the outbreak, there was
debate whether it was intentional or a glitch. On Blizzard's forums, posters
were commenting about how it was a fantastic world event, and calling it
"the day the plague wiped out Ironforge." It was described as the
first proper world event by an editor of a World of Warcraft fan site. After the
incident began, Blizzard received calls from angry customers complaining about
how they just died. Some players abandoned the game altogether until the
problem was fixed. The hard resets were described as a "blunt ending" by
Gamasutra. The people who spread the disease out of
malice were described by Security Focus editor Robert Lemos as terrorists of
World of Warcraft. He commented that this might be the first time a disease
passed from player to player in a game. Mark Ward, an editor for the BBC's web
site, brought up an incident years earlier in the computer game The Sims,
where many players' characters died of a curable disease originating from a dirty
guinea pig, though there was no way for the disease to spread to a different
player's character. Jeffrey Kaplan—a game designer for World
of Warcraft—commented that it gave them ideas for possible real events in the
future. Brian Martin—independent security consultant for World of
Warcraft—commented that it presented an in-game dynamic that was not expected by
players or Blizzard developers and that it reminds people that even in
controlled online atmospheres, unexpected consequences can occur. He
also compared it to a computer virus, stating that while it is not as serious,
it also reminds people of the impact computer code can have on them, and
they're not always safe, regardless of the precautions they take.
= Great Zombie Plague of '08 = During one week of October 2008, a
zombie plague was spread to promote the second World of Warcraft expansion,
Wrath of the Lich King, before its release. Unlike Corrupted Blood, this
plague was intentional and was dubbed by an authorized representative of Blizzard
Entertainment as the "Great Zombie Plague of '08". It was compared to
Corrupted Blood by The Sunday Times, which described the zombie plague as
being more true-to-life. The plague was contagious, but in contrast to Corrupted
Blood, which had 100% transmission to nearby characters, being in the vicinity
of a character infected with the zombie plague represented only a small risk of
transmission. This meant that encountering a lone zombie was not as
dangerous as encountering a large mass of infected. The event—which Blizzard
ended on 28 October—earned the company both praise and criticism from its fans.
Models for real-world research = Model for epidemic research =
In March 2007, Ran D Balicer, an epidemiologist physician at the
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Bersheva, Israel, published an article
in the journal Epidemiology that described the similarities between this
outbreak and the recent SARS and avian influenza outbreaks. Dr Balicer
suggested that role-playing games could serve as an advanced platform for
modeling the dissemination of infectious diseases. In a follow-up article in the
journal Science, the game Second Life was suggested as another possible
platform for these studies. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
contacted Blizzard Entertainment and requested statistics on this event for
research on epidemics but was told that it was a glitch.
The Corrupted Blood incident was described as a fascinating yet
accidental case study of modeling disease origins and control at the Games
for Health conference in Baltimore, Maryland by Gamasutra. They compared it
to a real-life epidemic, in that it originated in a remote, uninhabited
region and was carried by travelers to larger regions; hosts were both human
and animal, comparing it to the avian flu; was passed through close contact;
and there were people, in this case non-playable characters, who could
contract it but were asymptomatic. However, there were elements that
differed from a real-world epidemic, including an indicator for carriers that
they have the disease and how much risk they are at, which cannot be done in the
real world. One aspect of the epidemic that was not considered by
epidemiologists in their models was curiosity, describing how players would
rush into infected areas to witness the infection and then rush out. This was
paralleled to real-world behavior, specifically with how journalists would
rush toward a problem to cover it, and then rush back out.
In August 2007, Nina Fefferman—a Tufts University assistant research professor
of public health and family medicine—called for research on this
incident, citing the resemblances with biological plagues. Some scientists want
to study how people would react to environmental pathogens, by using the
virtual counterpart as a point of reference. Subsequently, she co-authored
a paper in Lancet Infectious Disease discussing the epidemiological and
disease modeling implications of the outbreak, along with Eric Lofgren, a
University of North Carolina graduate student. She spoke at the 2008 Games for
Health conference in Baltimore, Maryland and the 2011 Game Developers Conference
about the incident and how massively multiplayer online populations could
solve the problems inherent with more traditional models of epidemics.
Fefferman added that the three base models have their strengths and
weaknesses, but make significant behavioral assumptions. She also
compared Corrupted Blood to a drug trial with mice—"a real good first step." She
stated, "These are my mice [and] I want this to be my new experiment setup." She
expressed an interest in designing new diseases, perhaps non-fatal ones, to be
introduced to the game so she could study how risk is viewed, how rumors
would spread, and how public health notices are handled. She added that
Blizzard made such notices in the original outbreak, but kept changing its
position as it could not effectively deal with the problem. She commented
that she did not believe it would ruin gameplay, as World of Warcraft dealt
with health challenges in combat, and that games set in medieval times had
such health risk. She argued that if researchers and developers worked
together, it could be fun. While Blizzard was initially excited about the
proposition, it became less outwardly excited over time, though never rejected
it. She has been in contact with other developers, hoping to conduct the
simulation in similar games to World of Warcraft.
She thought that this was the only way to accomplish such a study, as
epidemiologists were limited to observational and retrospective studies,
because it would be immoral to release an infectious disease into the
population. She added that a computer model would be insufficient as well, as
it uses mathematical rules to approximate human behavior. Doctor Gary
Smith, professor of Population Biology and Epidemiology at the University of
Pennsylvania, commented that very few mathematical models of disease
transmission take host behavior into account, but also questioned how
representative of real life a virtual model could be. He stated that while the
characteristics of the disease could be defined beforehand, the study is just as
observational as one conducted on a real-life disease outbreak. However, he
added that one could argue that the proposal could give an opportunity for a
study that epidemiologists may never have. Neil Ferguson, director of the MRC
Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling at Imperial College, London,
felt skeptical of the idea, commenting that such a study could not properly
mimic genuine behavior. Using the zombie plague used to promote World of
Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King before its release as an example, players would
intentionally become infected to gain zombie powers. He added that characters
could also regenerate, meaning there was low risk in becoming infected. He felt
that while online games such as World of Warcraft could be set up to help
scientists study epidemics, it will always be limited as their primary use
is for entertainment. = Model for terrorism research =
In an analysis of the Corrupted Blood incident, Charles Blair, deputy director
of the Center of Terrorism and Intelligence Studies, said that World of
Warcraft could provide a powerful new way to study how terrorist cells form
and operate. While his organization already uses computer models to study
terrorists' tactics, Blair explained that because World of Warcraft involves
real people making real decisions in a world with controllable bounds, which
could provide a more realistic models for military intelligence analysts. For
example, one self-confessed virtual bioterrorist in World of Warcraft
commented about how quickly people got smart about doing the most damage to the
largest number of people. Yale University terrorism expert Stuart
Gottlieb admitted that while the outbreak was interesting and relevant to
the times, he would not base a counter-terrorism strategy on a video
game. Gottlieb expressed skepticism that analyzing the incident could shed light
on the complex underlying causes of terrorism in the real world, as the
stakes for both terrorists and civilians are lowered in a virtual setting.
However, as commented by the editor of the article, "the biggest weakness for
using a game as an analytical tool is that death in World of Warcraft is a
nuisance at most." Blizzard has maintained a position that
World of Warcraft is first and foremost a game, and that it was never designed
to mirror reality or anything in the real world.
References External links
Corrupted Blood on Wowpedia, a Warcraft wiki