Here's an interesting little bit of information I stumbled across while randomly surfing through wikipedia this evening. It relates to World of Warcraft, so nerds can rejoice. For those unfamiliar with the game, your character can pick up diseases and/or curses when battling the enemy. Like in the real world, these things can be a real downer, causing you to perform at less than your best.

A year or two ago, Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft, opened the games first 20 player raid dungeon, call Zul'Gurub, as part of patch 1.7. Basically the dungeon saw players taking on tribes of troll who were under the control of the Blood God, Hakkar the Soulflayer. Upon battling Hakkar, the dude with the brutal death metal sounding name, players were tagged with a debuff called "Corrupted Blood", which was a disease that caused the player to have their life sapped over time. The disease could also be passed on to other players that were nearby the infected player. Blizzards intention was that the disease was to only affect players so long as they were inside the dungeon. Unfortunately there appeared to be a bug in the system that allowed the disease to be carried outside of the dungeon, by way of Hunter's pets and Warlock's minions. Before long, corpses littered the World of Warcraft...

Within hours Corrupted Blood had infected entire cities such as Ironforge and Orgrimmar because of their high player concentrations. Low-level players were killed in seconds by the high-damage disease. Eventually Blizzard fixed the issue so that the plague could not exist outside of Zul'Gurub.

The corrupted blood plague so closely resembled the outbreak of real-world epidemics that scientists are currently looking at ways MMORPGs or other massively distributed systems can model human behavior during outbreaks. The reaction of players to the plague closely resembled previously hard-to-model aspects of human behavior that may allow researchers to more accurately predict how diseases and outbreaks spread amongst a population.

Source: Wikipedia entry

I find it incredible that such an event could be described as so closely resembling a real-world viral outbreak epidemic that scientists seriously examined the whole thing. Hopefully they considered the differences between World of Warcraft and real life. I mean, when was the last time that you saw someone die, respawn in a graveyard as a ghost, run back to their corpse, and come back to life?

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