The Lancet - journal of medicine, and publication title that appropriately makes me think of giant, suppurating boils - is reporting on World of Warcraft's inadvertent 'Corrupted Blood' plague, and how the data can be used to project and predict on realworld plague spread.
Says The Times:
The discovery, revealed in next month’s issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, has been hailed as a significant step forward in understanding how a deadly virus could break out.
“By using these games as an untapped experimental framework, we may be able to gain deeper insight into the incredible complexity of infectious disease epidemiology in social groups,” wrote the authors, Eric Lofgren, of Rutgers University, New Jersey, and Nina Fefferman, of Tufts University, Boston.
Holy suppurating pustules, batman.
(Thanks guildies!)
So I went to a State of Play event shortly after this plague had happened (but before I played WOW) and there was a conversation about people using this data to model actual plagues, which was going very well until someone said that he'd run around Azeroth purposefully infecting his friends because it was fun! At that point, people started questioning whether or not an environment that encouraged such different behaviour could really be considered an accurate model for real-world activity. I'd love to know more about this stuff though...
Posted by: Tom Coates | August 27, 2007 at 10:54