A Knight in Dragonland

This bit of news, covered by several major media outlets (including Reuters, The Economist, Forbes, and Time), falls into the category of truly bizarre but cool and innovative at the same time.

Nina Fefferman, an epidemiologist at Princeton University, and her former student, Eric Lofgren (last profile on the page), described how the outbreak of Corrupted Blood in the World of Warcraft could be used to model how real people would behave during a pandemic outbreak. Ran Balicer of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel has also promoted the idea of using WoW and other MMORPGs like Second Life (Science article here) to model human behavior during a pandemic and has described similarities between Corrupted Blood and SARS and H5N1 influenza outbreaks.

In their paper, Loffgren and Fefferman describe what they call the “stupid factor.” People will try to get close enough to observe the chaos inflicted by the epidemic out of morbid curiosity and end up getting infected themselves, promoting the spread of a virus. Epidemiologists have long recognized that it is difficult to keep people within a quarantine zone, but no one ever thought about people actually sneaking in and then out again.

Thus, the WoW phenomenon is actually helping to advance science and develop strategies to prevent viral pandemics. Maybe it’s not just a massive black hole sucking up human productivity. Whoda thunk?