🦠 The story of how World of Warcraft helped scientists study epidemics — 8 июля 2026 г. в 07:00:05.106
🦠 The story of how World of Warcraft helped scientists study epidemics In 2005, a new patch for World of Warcraft introduced a boss that applied a debuff called "Corrupted Blood" – a plague that slowly drained health and spread to nearby players. The developers intended it to work only inside the raid instance and disappear when players left. But a bug allowed hunter pets to carry the effect outside the dungeon. In cities, pets infected their owners, who then infected everyone around them. The epidemic broke loose and quickly swept across Azeroth. 🧑🤝🧑 Player reactions – just like real life Scientists didn't just study the spread mechanics – they focused on player behaviour: 🔹 Self‑isolation – many players voluntarily retreated to remote areas to avoid infecting others. 🔹 Altruism – healing classes offered free aid to the sick. 🔹 Panic and denial – some players rushed into infected zones "just to see" – and became the main spreaders. 🔹 Intentional sabotage – others deliberately got infected to infect others. 📚 How this helped science In 2007, epidemiologists Nina Fefferman (Rutgers University) and Eric Lofgren (Tufts University) – and Lofgren actually played WoW during that outbreak – published a paper in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. They pointed out that in World of Warcraft, millions of real people were acting in conditions very similar to a real pandemic. Traditional mathematical models rely on assumptions about human behaviour. Here, scientists got real‑world data on how people actually react: some flee, some help, some sabotage. When COVID‑19 hit in 2020, researchers returned to the Corrupted Blood incident and used it as a model to predict the spread of infection and public response. In 2022, the Doherty Institute confirmed that the virtual epidemic data truly helped to better understand the behavioural factors that played a key role in COVID‑19 transmission. 🤔 Just think about it – a game‑breaking bug that nearly destroyed a virtual world gave epidemiologists unique insight into how people behave during real epidemics.