|
Phun with Phobias: Virtual Disease |
|
|
|
Dr. Samuel Says -
Weirdness
|
|
Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
|
|
Tuesday, 28 August 2007 |
|
The idea of virtual worlds has been around a long time. It's something of an industry now, what with The Sims , and Second Life , and the mushrooming universe of MMORPGs . It's no longer science fiction, or even just kinda real. It's really real, and people really do live entire lives online.
 Then we have the concept of computer viruses, which are real, but in
concept are actually metaphors referencing actual biological viruses.
With computer viruses, computers get infected, not people. (Except
sometimes.) Stay with me here.
So what happens when a biological virus (which is real, except it
isn't) infects virtual world (which isn't real, except it is), and
causes a genuine panic? That's the strange situation we have on our
hands with this recent report from the BBC. It seems that something
called the "corrupted blood" disease has broken out in the popular
MMORPG World of Warcraft . As the infection raged, thousands of avatars
were killed in the resultant plague. All part of the game, right?
But epidemiologists are taking it all quite seriously, and suggest that
the virtual outbreak could have real-world value in studying how people
behave in the midst of a deadly epidemic. "Human behavior has a big
impact on disease spread," says researcher Nina Fefferman, from Tufts
University School of Medicine. "And virtual worlds offer an excellent
platform for studying human behavior. The players seemed to really feel
they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even
though it was only a game."
For instance, according to the BBC report, while some players acted
nobly -- risking infection to help others -- many panicked, fleeing the
virtual cities in droves, and some doomed souls tried to deliberately
infect others. Fefferman and others believe that studying such
phenomena in virtual worlds could yield valuable insights. Unlike
mathematical simulations, such a study would observe real people making
decisions in real time. Without the messiness of, you know, actually
releasing an infectious disease into, say, Cleveland.
Science marches on.
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
