The Most Terrifying Pandemic in the Virtual World

On September 13, 2005, an incredibly contagious virus started to spread fast, mercilessly, and uncontrollably throughout the world. A necessary clarification: it happened in the World of Warcraft. It is right, it was not a living germ, but a computer bug. Millions of people play the mentioned MMORPG immersing into a huge virtual universe less or more frequently. Here you can make friends, travel, look for adventures, earn money - basically everything self-sufficient people do in the real world if it is boring for them to spend 14 hours a day in front of the screen.

The disease started in an unprecedented way for the world epidemiology - from the Blood God, Hakkar the Soulflayer. It was the final boss of the Zul’Gurub raid. The creature pumped blood out of the players in order to sustain his own health. To defeat him, it was necessary to cast a spell on your character called Corrupted Blood. It led to the eclipse of power of the player, infected the allies and random citizens, however, it poisoned Hakkar who sucked the poisoned substance out of his victim.

We can only envy the developers’ imagination. This spell might be used only in Zul’Gurub where Hakkar lived. If the character resurged beyond the zone, his blood no longer was poisonous. However, due to the aggravating coding mistake, the players’ pets were still contagious, and, as a result, there was a real mess in the places where they appeared in the main world of the game. The curse perished everybody around spreading in chain order somewhere nobody expected. At that moment, epidemiologists from the real world got interested in everything going on in the game. Most of them must have been playing World of Warcraft. These specialists took a professional interest in the ugliness.

The thing is that the computer simulation of epidemics is a rather difficult task as it is impossible to imbed human’s stupidity that cannot be explained logically into the calculating algorithm. For example, the decision to fly to the country engulfed in a dangerous disease because the package tours there have fallen in price dramatically. Here everything was really similar to people’s behavior in real life. Each character was controlled by a person who made all decisions, even idiotic ones, by themselves.

We should say that many players treated the spreading of the disease by their pets in a very sensible way. They stopped flocking. The characters that were able to cure became doctors in town centers voluntarily. Low-level vulnerable characters organized patrolling the borders of the settlements to warn people about the danger. Another category of people reacted in the opposite way. The developers suggested sticking to the quarantine but instead of following the advice, these humorists started to spread the disease intentionally. What kind of game is it if people cannot behave like a crazy band?

One of the brightest behavior examples noticed by the scientists was curiosity demonstrated by healthy players. They, like real journalists, entered the contagious regions intentionally to find out what was happening there and after that, they tried to leave it before they caught the disease. It turned out to be a great way to lose your life. The scientists also noticed other parallels to the reality - the disease spread by both people and animals like, for example, bird influenza or swine influenza. It also had asymptomatic carriers - non-player characters. They could not die themselves but they infected everything around. And, finally, the most interesting analogy with the reality – there were many conspiracy theorists and rumor spreaders who were looking for someone to blame.

In the end, the epidemic touched more than 4 million users. The towns were swamped by corpses and the most terrible was the fact that many players had to go out to the street and interact with real people while they were waiting for the solution to the problem. Consequently, the interest in the incident with the corrupted blood was taken by rather serious establishments including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Tufts University. The Blizzard company, the developer of the computer game, was contacted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in order to get the statistics of the spreading of the virtual pandemic.

Despite the fact that everything that was happening in World of Warcraft resembled a real epidemic a lot, the end of the story was obscure. We may also say that it was kind of interrupted. A weak later the developers released a patch, rebooted several servers and everything got back on the track.