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This week at Half as Interesting, in order to take your mind off of what’s happening
in the world, we thought it would be nice to talk about something calm, relaxing, and
in no way related to current events.
On September 13, 2005, an incredibly infectious virus began a rapid, deadly, uncontrollable
spread throughout the entire World… of Warcraft.
That’s right, today we aren’t talking about a real virus, we’re talking about
a computer virus.
But not like a computer virus… a computer virus, like not a virus on your computer,
but a virus that could get on the computer… well you couldn’t get it, but your avatar
could get… is that clear?
Now, if you don’t know what World of Warcraft is, congratulations, you probably had friends
in middle school.
It is a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game, or MMORPG, with millions of people all
playing together in a massive shared virtual world.
You could make friends, go on adventures, make money—you know, the types of things
cool people were doing in the real world instead sitting in front of a computer screen for
14 hours a day.
But let’s get to the disease.
It started the same way that so many infectious diseases have started throughout world history:
with a Blood God named Hakkar the Soulflayer.
He was the end boss in a new World of Warcraft raid area called Zul’Gurub, named such because
Zul’Gurub is super easy to spell and pronounce.
You see, Hakkar would steal blood from players in order to keep up his own health and the
key to beating him was to cast a debuff spell on yourself called Corrupted Blood, which
would steadily drain your health and infect the players around you, but would also ultimately
make Hakkar vulnerable once he started siphoning your, now corrupted, blood.
It was a classic “poison your own blood in order to, by extension, poison the blood
of a soulflayer” scenario—the kind we all run into in regular, day-to-day life.
Now, the Corrupted Blood spell was intended to apply only in the specific area where you
fought Hakkar—if a player respawned into the main world, their Corrupted Blood would
simply disappear, just like the social life of a World of Warcraft player.
But because of a coding error, that wasn’t the case for players’ pets, meaning that
when pets respawned in the regular world, they still had Corrupted Blood, and could
spread it to players, who spread it to other players, who spread it to other players and
so on and so on—and that’s when the epidemiologists got interested.
You see, modeling disease outbreaks is really hard because models struggle to account for
how people actually act, mostly because people are dumb and do dumb stuff, like going to
the beach during a pandemic.
But the Corrupted Blood incident offered researchers a solution, because each online avatar was
controlled by an actual person, who would make their own, potentially stupid, decisions
about how to respond.
Now, some players responded smartly—dense urban areas were evacuated, characters who
had healing capabilities volunteered as doctors and worked in city centers, and low-level,
vulnerable characters stood at city limits to warn others—but others responded, well,
the opposite of smartly.
The game developers offered a voluntary quarantine, but many players didn’t follow it, and others
began intentionally spreading the disease, because it wouldn’t be an online video game
if people didn’t act like massive jerks.
One of the most interesting phenomena to scientists was curiosity, as healthy players would venture
into infected areas to see what was happening, and then try to rush out before they got infected,
which it turned out, was a great way to get infected.
Researchers noted that these players were acting similar to journalists, who intentionally
enter infected areas to gather information, while attempting to still avoid getting sick.
The Corrupted Blood incident also included many other real-world parallels: It was spread
both by people and by animals, as are many real-world diseases, like avian or swine flu,
and it even had asymptomatic carriers—the Non-Playable Characters, who couldn’t die,
but who could and did get infected and spread the virus to vulnerable players.
Of course, in the most accurate real-world parallel, everybody online got really angry,
spread false rumors, and looked for someone to blame.
In the end, over 4 million players were affected by the outbreak, the cities were piled up
with the bones of dead players, and most horribly, some gamers were forced to go outside and
interact with actual human beings until the problem was fixed.
Of course, not everything was a perfect real-world analogue.
Players in World of Warcraft wouldn’t actually die permanently, plus, because of their damage-per-second
meter, Warcraft players had what researchers referred to as an “accurate perception of
risk,” something humans tend to lack—and, in the real world there are no mystical creatures
expect for Willem Dafoe, who is a goblin, Ed Sheeran, who is a leprechaun, and trolls,
who are in the comments section.
The spread of the Corrupted Blood incident ended up as the focus of studies done by researchers
at the University of North Carolina and Tufts, and the CDC even contacted Blizzard to ask
for statistics on how the virtual pandemic had spread.
But while Corrupted Blood may have spread like a real disease, it didn’t end like
one; after a week, the developers put an end to the pandemic by coding in a patch and doing
a hard restart on several servers, which I have to say, seems a lot easier than all of
this quarantine stuff, so I’m expecting a hard reset on earth any day now.
Now, if you’re someone who spends a lot of time playing online games and you were
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