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Virtual epidemics: playing with infectious diseases
So I was sitting in my car tonight, surfing Google News on my brand-new Helio mobile device, and I came across a story I knew I had to write about. Considering that I started my day blogging at 6:30am, I guess it is fitting that I should end my day the same way.
In "Game worlds could help epidemic studies," CBC News reports on an article in next month's issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases in which researchers suggest that online gaming environments such as World of Warcraft and Second Life offer ideal conditions to study individual responses to disease epidemic and virus control.
Diseases can be introduced into the controlled environments of these virtual reality worlds -- which are populated by thousands or even millions of individual players. Their effects can then be studied and applied to real-world epidemic control and prevention.
The researchers -- Eric Lofgren of Rutgers University and Nina Fefferman of Tufts University -- describe what happened two years ago when a programming error caused an outbreak of a highly contagious disease within Warcraft that left thousands of characters dead. Gaming Today describes the highly popular Warcraft as a "Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games" (MMO); the gaming blog refers to the incident as the "Corrupted Blood epidemic."
The blog quotes Fefferman:
"Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour. . . . The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game."
At our pre-conference workshop in May, and in some of my earlier blog entries, we've talked about how organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are using Second Life for health education and outreach purposes. But the Lancet article seems to be the first time that the medical field has looked within an MMO for real health data like this.