On Sept 13 , 2005 , a disease get to spread in the massively multiplayer on-line office - playing game ( MMORPG ) World of Warcraft .
An update to the biz had introduced a newfangled area for high - grade players , known as Zul’Gurub . In the area , there was a Bos called " Hakkar the Soul Flayer " ( warning : this article may contain words used by dork ) , a massive fly serpent that had a power that had n’t been precede to the world yet : " Corrupted Blood " .
The approximation was that Hakkar would infect players with the disease , dealing875 - 1125 item of damage plus 200 damage per second to the target and all nearby opposition for 10 second . The unequaled part of this disease was that it would spread to other musician in the vicinity of the infected player , all of whom would then lose wellness .
It was suppose to be annoying to players during this one battle , but ultimately stay in this specific area while you fought the boss . However , the creators had n’t thought thing through .
Hakkar was capable to air the virus to player ' pets . Unfortunately , this meant that when you give the sack your pet when they were infected , unidentified to patient zero , they remained septic until they were summon again somewhere outside of the boss field .
Patient zero summoned his pet in a city elsewhere in World of Warcraft , and the plague spread like , well , a plague . Adding to the trouble was that non - playable characters ( NPCs ) that give out quests to the players could cut the disease and disperse it to others , without taking damage or die , essentially acting like symptomless spreaders .
The resulting pandemic became what the player ( and epidemiologist ) now refer to as the Hakkar Blood Plague or the Corrupted Blood incident , footage of which can be seen below .
What ’s especially cool about the incident , specially for epidemiologist , is how well it pose actual viruses and outbreaks in the material world , as has been pointed out in a train of thought latterly on Twitter , as well as in a 2007 paperpublished in The Lancet .
It kill low - level participant quickly , simulating the vulnerable such as the senior or the immunocompromised . You have player who can teleport from city to city , simulating traveling by line in the real world . Stronger instrumentalist could hold up the disease , hardly being break by it , imitate those who get mildly ill from a disease .
Then you have the added incentive that people would behave in ways standardized to how they would do in the real world .
In an endeavor to master the irruption , the game ’s makers tried to instigate a quarantine , asking the infected to isolate themselves from uninfected areas . As with real life-time , many players were compliant but others resist the quarantine . Due to the highly contagious nature of the disease , the eruption soon spread through the city .
As well as people who would spread ( on purpose or by accident ) the disease around cities , you also had many people who would attempt to heal the sick and the death , act like first - answerer and trefoil in the literal existence . According to the Lancet paper , unluckily , this may have extended the Corrupted ancestry outbreak " by keeping infect individuals alive long enough for them to continue spread out the disease , and by becoming taint themselves and being extremely transmissible when they rushed to another expanse " though overall they may have reduced mortality rate .
at last , attempting to deal with the eruption through in - worldly concern quantity fail due to player not taking the risks seriously , and head to areas where there were transmission , circulate it themselves to others . It had to be fixed by ramble out another update .
Though slightly empty-headed and ultimately of no consequence , it was a serious model to see if an extremely highly - contagious disease could be carry through public wellness action . Many of the player ' commitment to the game was so strong that it gave researcher a pretty sound modelling for how people would act in a real outbreak .
" All together , these seemingly unobjectionable prospect of the game world , each directly mirroring an look of real - earth epidemiology , permit what should have been a very venial spot of interestingness in a small surface area of the game , catering to a very specific subset of the player , to become the first on-line representative of uncontrolled plague to affect millions of Americans , Asians , and Europeans at home , " writer of the 2005 study write in their paper .
It gave some good lessons for how people might deal with an irruption in the real world , and the authors made trace for how further games could be used to sit more naturalistic diseases that might cause a pandemic .
Then , unluckily , we all learned the hard manner .
