Swine Flu and WoW

On the first day of class we were told about the virus that spread throughout the World of Warcraft that was able to cripple everyone (or something to that fashion.) Originally, the virus was built in game to make sure no one character became too powerful (for those of you that watch South Park, turns out one character can indeed get too powerful, from ep. "Make Love not Warcraft"). The game designers wanted to stop the effect of the virus but it kept on spreading and couldn't be contained.

It turns out that scientists from Canada, on the even of the possible Swine Flu pandemic, decided to go back and research the virus that spread throughout the World of Warcraft. They found that many characters in the game were just carriers of the computer virus, it didn't effect them, yet their were able to spread it to others, much like what happens with diseases in the real world. They are taking what they learned about the spread of the WoW virus and are trying to apply it to the real world situation of the Swine Flu outbreak.

In a way this makes sense since the World of Warcraft is basically a social network, gaming style, since every characters interacts with others and they gain levels or what not (I don't know that much about the game). A spread in such a large computer world can indeed mimic real life as we learned about on the first day in class, it took only 5 days (I think) for a virus to spread from one person to the whole class. Everyone was able to make an edge to another person. It is not hard to imagine how a computer virus that caused a pandemic in WoW can help researches study trends of real life flu outbreaks.

Whatever is learned from this WoW research may or may not be helpful, but these scientists will still be gaming nerds.

http://www.popsci.com/entertainment-amp-gaming/article/2009-05/new-meaning-computer-virus