http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6951918.stm

 
I stumbled on this BBC article about the World of Warcraft while doing research on the game for another class. Apparently in 2005, Blizzard Entertainment, the game’s developers, introduced a patch containing a new dungeon where characters could become infected with a highly contagious virtual plague named “Corrupted Blood.” Due to a lack of foresight on the developers’ part, the infection, which was meant to be limited to the dungeon area, spread quickly to many of the virtual world’s major cities and other areas of high player concentration, ultimately infecting and killing thousands of characters. The plague even apparently made it through quarantine barriers. How tragic.

 
Though Blizzard Entertainment soon fixed the problem, interest has been renewed as of late because of a couple of papers released in 2007 which observed that the plague outbreak greatly resembled actual epidemic patterns, like those of the recent SARS and bird-flu outbreaks. The authors have further suggested that massively multiplayer online (MMO) virtual environments could be potentially used to more accurately model and test such phenomenon. Even the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has allegedly requested information and statistics about the corrupted blood epidemic. What makes the MMO platform so appealing for this purpose is that unlike existing models that use mathematical rules and probabilities to approximate human actions, the individuals playing these games tend to be so invested in their characters and their survival that behave as people would be expected to in real situations, exhibiting a diverse array of responses. Researchers could even work together with the developers of these games to conduct actual experiments, which have until now been completely unfeasible and more importantly, unethical. Furthermore, while some might question the external validity of player reactions and responses in a fantasy game like World of Warcraft, the same argument does not nearly apply so much to virtual worlds like Second Life, which approximate real life and interactions.

 
While this notion of modeling the spread of infection in real life is certainly fascinating and applicable to network structure and other topics discussed in class, what I find to be even more exciting is the underlying idea that our activities and behaviors in virtual worlds and networks can mirror physical processes and phenomena as they occur in the real world. While this article and related papers focus on the spread of disease, the potential of meta- worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life to test and observe network theories is seemingly unlimited. Whereas actual social networks can be impossible to accurately draw up and model, let alone monitor and update, it can be very easy to track and trace participants in online worlds and their various interactions and behaviors on micro and macro levels. Thus if researchers were ever able to obtain permission to monitor players in massively multiplayer online games, they could relatively easily and accurately construct the entire social network for a given game server, using chat logs, guild and player group lists, trade data, etc. Network structure and related concepts and processes like the “Small-World Phenomenon,” the different types of closure, structural balance, weak ties, and popularity could be easily explored by just examining the dynamics of the network. If the game’s economic transactions were reconciled with this model, it would even be possible to naturally observe and apply network exchange theory. Virtual worlds clearly hold a lot of promise for studying network phenomena.

Further reading:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/316/5827/961a

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/gadgets_and_gaming/article2296354.ece