Corrupted Blood incident
Encyclopedia
MMORPG
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994...
. The epidemic began with the introduction of the new dungeon Zul'Gurub and its end boss Hakkar, who when confronted and attacked would cast a hit point
Health (gaming)
Health is a game mechanic used in role-playing, computer and video games to give value to characters, enemies, NPCs, and related objects. This value can either be numerical, semi-numerical as in hit/health points, or arbitrary as in a life bar....
draining and highly-contagious debuff spell "Corrupted Blood".
The spell, intended to last only seconds and function only within the new area of Zul'Gurub, soon spread across the virtual world
Virtual world
A virtual world is an online community that takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects. The term has become largely synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of...
when players discovered that the use of teleportation spells could take the affliction out of its intended confines. By both accidental and purposeful intent, a pandemic
Pandemic
A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that is spreading through human populations across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or even worldwide. A widespread endemic disease that is stable in terms of how many people are getting sick from it is not a pandemic...
ensued that quickly killed lower-level characters and annoyed higher-leveled ones, drastically changing normal gameplay, as players did what they could to avoid infection. Despite measures such as programmer-imposed quarantines, the players' abandoning densely populated cities (or even just not playing the game), the epidemic was only finally controlled with a combination of patches and resets of the virtual world.
The conditions and reactions of the event attracted the attention of epidemiologists
Epidemiology
Epidemiology is the study of health-event, health-characteristic, or health-determinant patterns in a population. It is the cornerstone method of public health research, and helps inform policy decisions and evidence-based medicine by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive...
for its implications of how human populations could react to a real-world epidemic. Anti-terrorism officials also took notice of the event noting the implications of some players planning and perpetuating the epidemic.
History
The epidemic began on September 13, 2005, when Blizzard introduced a new raid called Zul'Gurub into the game as part of a new update. Its end boss, Hakkar, could affect players by using a debuff called Corrupted Blood, a disease that damages players over time, this one specifically doing significant damage. The disease could be passed on between any nearby characters, and would kill characters of lower level in a few seconds while higher level characters could keep themselves alive. It would disappear as time passed or when the character died. Due to a programming error, players—either inadvertently or intentionally—spread this effect by teleporting out of Zul'Gurub and passing it on to other players.Although the disease was intended as a "short-term, short-range annoyance", some players took advantage of the teleport glitch. Non-playable characters could contract the disease, but were asymptomatic
Asymptomatic
In medicine, a disease is considered asymptomatic if a patient is a carrier for a disease or infection but experiences no symptoms. A condition might be asymptomatic if it fails to show the noticeable symptoms with which it is usually associated. Asymptomatic infections are also called subclinical...
to it and could spread it to others. At least three of the game's servers were affected. One factor that may have limited its spread to some servers is that the boss is difficult to kill. Discussion forum posters described seeing "hundreds of bodies" lying in the streets of the towns and cities. Deaths in World of Warcraft are not permanent, as characters would be resurrected shortly afterward. However, dying in such a way will be disadvantageous to the player's character and consequently it is inconvenient to get the infection.
During the epidemic, normal gameplay was disrupted. Player responses varied but resembled real-world behaviors. Some characters with healing abilities volunteered their services, some lower-level characters who could not help would direct people away from infected areas, some characters would flee to uninfected areas, and some characters attempted to spread the disease to others — resembling behavior attributed to early AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
patient Gaëtan Dugas
Gaëtan Dugas
Gaëtan Dugas was a Canadian who worked for Air Canada as a flight attendant. Dugas became notorious as the alleged patient zero for AIDS, though he is now more accurately regarded as one of many highly sexually active men who spread AIDS widely before the disease was identified.-Patient Zero...
and Typhoid patient Mary Mallon
Mary Mallon
Mary Mallon , also known as Typhoid Mary, was the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen associated with typhoid fever. She was presumed to have infected some 53 people, three of whom died, over the course of her career as a cook...
. Players in the game reacted to the disease as if there was real risk to their well-being. Blizzard Entertainment attempted to institute a voluntary quarantine
Quarantine
Quarantine is compulsory isolation, typically to contain the spread of something considered dangerous, often but not always disease. The word comes from the Italian quarantena, meaning forty-day period....
to stem the disease, but it failed, as some players didn't take it seriously, while others took advantage of the pandemonium. Despite certain security measures, players overcame them by giving the disease to summonable pets. They were forced to fix the problem by instituting hard resets of the servers and applying "quick fixes".
Reaction
World of Warcraft, at the time, had more than two million players all over the world. Before Blizzard Entertainment commented on the outbreak, there was debate whether it was intentional or a glitch. On Blizzard's forums, posters were commenting about how it was a fantastic world event, and calling it "the day the plague wiped out Ironforge." It was described as the first proper "world event" by an editor of a World of Warcraft fan site. After the incident began, Blizzard received calls from angry customers complaining about how they just died. Some players abandoned the game altogether until the problem was fixed. The hard resets were described as a "blunt ending" by GamasutraGamasutra
Gamasutra is a website founded in 1997 for video game developers. It is owned and operated by UBM TechWeb , a division of United Business Media, and acts as the online sister publication to the print magazine Game Developer...
.
The people who spread the disease out of malice were described by Security Focus editor Robert Lemos as terrorists of World of Warcraft. He commented that this may be the first time that a disease has passed between player to player in a game. Mark Ward, an editor for the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
's web site, brought up an incident years earlier in the computer game The Sims
The Sims
The Sims is a strategic life-simulation computer game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. Its development was led by game designer Will Wright, also known for developing SimCity...
, where many players' characters died of an infectious disease originating from a dirty guinea pig
Guinea pig
The guinea pig , also called the cavy, is a species of rodent belonging to the family Caviidae and the genus Cavia. Despite their common name, these animals are not in the pig family, nor are they from Guinea...
, though there was no way for the disease to spread to a different player's character.
Jeffrey Kaplan—a game designer for World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994...
—commented that it gave them ideas for possible real events in the future. Brian Martin—independent security consultant for World of Warcraft—commented that it presented an in-game dynamic that was not expected by players or Blizzard developers and that it reminds people that even in controlled online atmospheres, unexpected consequences can occur. He also compared it to a computer virus
Computer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...
, stating that while it is not as serious, it also reminds people of the impact computer code can have on them, and they're not always safe, regardless of the precautions they take.
Great Zombie Plague of '08
During one week of October 2008, a zombie plagueZombie apocalypse
A zombie apocalypse is a particular scenario of apocalyptic literature that customarily has a science fiction/horror rationale. In a zombie apocalypse, a widespread rise of zombies hostile to human life engages in a general assault on civilization....
was spread to promote the second World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, often referred to as WotLK, WLK or Wrath, is the second expansion set for the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft, following The Burning Crusade...
, before its release. Unlike Corrupted Blood, this plague was intentional and was dubbed by an authorized representative of Blizzard Entertainment as the "Great Zombie Plague of '08". It was compared to Corrupted Blood by The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper.The Sunday Times may also refer to:*The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times...
, who described the zombie plague as being more true-to-life. The plague was highly contagious, but in contrast to Corrupted Blood, which had 100% transmission to nearby characters, being in the vicinity of a character infected with the zombie plague represented only a small risk of transmission. This meant that encountering a lone zombie was not as dangerous as encountering a large mass of infected. The event—which Blizzard ended on 28 October—earned the company both praise and criticism from its fans.
Model for epidemic research
In March 2007, Ran D Balicer, an epidemiologist physician at the Ben-Gurion University in Israel, published an article in the journal Epidemiology describing the similarities between this outbreak and the recent SARS and avian influenza outbreaks. Dr Balicer suggested role-playing games could serve as an advanced platform for modeling the dissemination of infectious diseases. In a follow-up article in the journal Science, the game Second LifeSecond Life
Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab. It was launched on June 23, 2003. A number of free client programs, or Viewers, enable Second Life users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars...
was suggested as another possible platform for these studies. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services headquartered in Druid Hills, unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, in Greater Atlanta...
contacted Blizzard Entertainment and requested statistics on this event for research on epidemics, but was told that it was a glitch.
The Corrupted Blood incident was described as a fascinating, yet accidental, case study of modeling disease origins and control at the Games for Health conference in Baltimore, Maryland by Gamasutra
Gamasutra
Gamasutra is a website founded in 1997 for video game developers. It is owned and operated by UBM TechWeb , a division of United Business Media, and acts as the online sister publication to the print magazine Game Developer...
. They compared it to a real-life epidemic, in that it originated in a remote, uninhabited region and was carried by travelers to larger regions; hosts were both human and animal, comparing it to the avian flu
Avian flu
Avian influenza, sometimes avian flu, and commonly bird flu, refers to "influenza caused by viruses adapted to birds." Of the greatest concern is highly pathogenic avian influenza ....
; was passed through close contact; and there were people, in this case non-playable characters, who could contract it but were asymptomatic
Asymptomatic
In medicine, a disease is considered asymptomatic if a patient is a carrier for a disease or infection but experiences no symptoms. A condition might be asymptomatic if it fails to show the noticeable symptoms with which it is usually associated. Asymptomatic infections are also called subclinical...
. However, there were elements that differed from a real-world epidemic, including an indicator for carriers that they have the disease and how much risk they are at, which cannot be done in the real world. One aspect of the epidemic that was not considered by epidemiologists in their models was curiosity, describing how players would rush into infected areas to witness the infection and then rush out. This was paralleled to real-world behavior, specifically with how journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
s would rush toward a problem to cover it, and then rush back out.
In August 2007, Nina Fefferman—a Tufts University
Tufts University
Tufts University is a private research university located in Medford/Somerville, near Boston, Massachusetts. It is organized into ten schools, including two undergraduate programs and eight graduate divisions, on four campuses in Massachusetts and on the eastern border of France...
assistant research professor of public health and family medicine—called for research on this incident, citing the resemblances with biological plagues. Some scientists want to study how people would react to environmental pathogen
Pathogen
A pathogen gignomai "I give birth to") or infectious agent — colloquially, a germ — is a microbe or microorganism such as a virus, bacterium, prion, or fungus that causes disease in its animal or plant host...
s, by using the virtual counterpart as a point of reference. Subsequently, she co-authored a paper in Lancet Infectious Disease discussing the epidemiological and disease modeling implications of the outbreak, along with Eric Lofgren, a University of North Carolina
University of North Carolina
Chartered in 1789, the University of North Carolina was one of the first public universities in the United States and the only one to graduate students in the eighteenth century...
graduate student. She spoke at the 2008 Games for Health
Games for Health
Games for Health is a series of conferences made possible in part by funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as part of their Pioneer Portfolio program...
conference in Baltimore, Maryland and the 2011 Game Developers Conference
Game Developers Conference
The Game Developers Conference is the largest annual gathering of professional video game developers, focusing on learning, inspiration, and networking...
about the incident and how massively multiplayer online populations could solve the problems inherent with more traditional models of epidemics.
Fefferman added that the three base models have their strengths and weaknesses, but make significant behavioral assumptions. She also compared Corrupted Blood to a drug trial with mice—"a real good first step." She stated that "these are my mice" and that "I want this to be my new experiment setup." She expressed an interest in designing new diseases, perhaps non-fatal ones, to be introduced to the game so she could study how risk is viewed, how rumors would spread, and how public health notices are handled. She added that such notices were made in the original outbreak, but kept changing its position as it could not effectively deal with the problem. She commented that she did not believe it would ruin gameplay, as World of Warcraft dealt with health challenges in combat, and that games set in medieval times had such health risk. She argued that if researchers and developers worked together, it could be fun. While Blizzard was initially excited about the proposition, it became less outwardly excited over time, though never rejected it. She has been in contact with other developers, hoping to conduct the simulation in similar games to World of Warcraft.
She thought that this was the only way to accomplish such a study, as epidemiologists were limited to observational and retrospective studies, because it would be immoral to release an infectious disease into the population. She added that a computer model would be insufficient as well, as it uses mathematical rules to approximate human behavior. Doctor Gary Smith, professor of Population Biology and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
, commented that very few mathematical models of disease transmission take host behavior into account, but also questioned how representative of real life a virtual model could be. He stated that while the characteristics of the disease could be defined beforehand, the study is just as observational as one conducted on a real-life disease outbreak. However, he added that one could argue that the proposal could give an opportunity for a study that epidemiologists may never have. Neil Ferguson, director of the MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling at Imperial College, London, felt skeptical of the idea, commenting that such a study could not properly mimic genuine behavior. Using the zombie plague used to promote World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, often referred to as WotLK, WLK or Wrath, is the second expansion set for the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft, following The Burning Crusade...
before its release as an example, players would intentionally become infected to gain zombie powers. He added that characters could also regenerate, meaning there was low risk in becoming infected. He felt that while online games such as World of Warcraft could be set up to help scientists study epidemics, it will always be limited as their primary use is for entertainment.
Model for terrorism research
In an analysis of the Corrupted Blood incident, Charles Blair, deputy director of the Center of Terrorism and Intelligence Studies, said that World of Warcraft could provide a powerful new way to study how terrorist cells form and operate. While his organization already uses computer models to study terrorists' tactics, Blair explained that because World of Warcraft involves real people making real decisions in a world with controllable bounds, which could provide a more realistic models for military intelligence analysts.For example, one self-confessed virtual bioterrorist in World of Warcraft commented about how quickly people got smart about doing the most damage to the largest number of people.
Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
terrorism expert Stuart Gottlieb admitted that while the outbreak was interesting and relevant to the times, he would not base a counter-terrorism strategy on a video game. Gottlieb expressed skepticism that analyzing the incident could shed light on the complex underlying causes of terrorism in the real world, as the stakes for both terrorists and civilians are lowered in a virtual setting. However, as commented by the editor of the article, "the biggest weakness for using a game as an analytical tool is that death in World of Warcraft is a nuisance at most."
Blizzard has maintained a position that World of Warcraft is first and foremost a game, and that it was never designed to mirror reality or anything in the real world.