Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - DOUBLE BILL: When a Plague Struck World of Warcraft/Blood on the Tracks

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

As a special New Year treat we're presenting two Cautionary Tales Shorts - which have previously only been available to paying Apple and Pushkin+ subscribers.  When a Plague Struck World of Warcraft: The makers of WoW wanted to spice up the fantasy computer game by introducing a virtual disease - "Corrupted Blood". It was supposed to be a fun challenge for expert player - but the illness became a pandemic which wiped out villages, cities and then whole realms. AND Blood on the Tracks: The signalmen running a busy stretch of railroad on the Scottish border had to adhere to strict rules to prevent crashes - but did those regulations fail to take into account human nature? Despite all the logbooks, alarm bells, levers and regulations, the signalmen didn't seem to notice a packed troop train barrelling towards them. For a full list of sources go to timharford.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with MS-13 Nelsabrador? How the Russian Mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn in the 1990s? What about that time I got lost in the Burmese jungle hunt in the world's biggest MF lab? Why the Japanese Yakuza have all those crazy dragons at those? I'm Sean Williams. And I'm Danny Goldz. And we're the host of the Underworld podcast. We're journalists that have traveled all over, reporting on dangers people in places.

And every week we'll be bringing you a new story about organized crime from all over the world. We know this stuff because we've been there we've seen it and we've got the near misses and embarrassing tales to go with it. We'll mix in reporting with our own experiences in the field and we'll throw in some bad jokes while we're at it. The only world podcast explores the criminal underworld that affect all of our lives whether we we know it or not. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin. Hello, Tim Haafard here, and I have a special start to the year for you.

I've been sitting on some great ideas for gripping cautionary tales, their stories full of exactly the kind of instructive downfalls and disasters I love, but I've never quite found the right place to tell them during our normal shows. They're cracking yarns that just don't require a full episode to recount. That's why I came up with cautionary tales shorts, and so far these bite-sized stories have only been available to push in plus subscribers, but I'm going to let you hear two of them here back to back. The first of our cautionary tales shorts starts in another world.

Just another day in Azeroth. Some citizens are enjoying themselves, indulging in the everyday activities that Azeroth has to offer. Exploring, accepting quests, trading, hanging out with their pet scorepids and octopodes, or getting into fights, living their best lives in a fantasy kingdom. But for the mighty heroes, tough enough to enter the unexplored jungle realm of Zul-Gurube, the expectation was that they would leave a dream, and enter a nightmare, the domain of the blood god, Haka, the Soul Flare. of the blood god, Hacker, the Soul Flare.

What am I talking about? A computer game called World of Warcraft. But on that particular day, September the 13th, 2005, something was happening inside that computer game that was to become strangely prophetic. The nightmare of Hakka, the soul-flair, was not going to be confined to Zul-Guru. And Tim Halford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. That means hundreds of thousands of people are online at the same time, able to interact with each other by talking, trading, brawling, casting spells, or teaming up in epic battles. Stories in World of Warcraft emerge from what the players do as they interact together, reacting to what the game throws at them.

In Warcraft, those players take on the role of fantastical characters, such as crafty rogues, virtuous paladins, or amoral warlocks. Players who play a lot have characters who leveled up, becoming tougher and tougher, effectively becoming a mythical hero in a world filled with mediocrities. Mythical heroes need worthy challenges and that is why, from time to time, Blizzard Entertainment, the company that produces World of Warcraft, adds new realms, new quests, new and terrible foes. Fos, such as the Blood God, Hacker, the Soul Flayer, who lurked deep in the realm of Zulgerub. As soon as Blizzard Entertainment rolled out the software update

that created Zulgerub, curious players naturally sent their characters in to have a look. Inexperienced, low-level characters didn't stand a chance, either they were slain or they quickly retreated to safer regions. Zulgarub was designed to be a tough challenge for high-level characters than mightiest heroes in the world. Hacker, the Soulflayer, could place a curse on people with the temerity to confront him. A curse called Corrupted Blood.

If your character had corrupted blood, the game would depict a fountain of gore spurting from them with a squelching sound, and their health would start draining away. That could be fatal almost immediately for low-level characters, but for the high-level heroes fighting Hacker the Soul Flayer it was more of an inconvenience. They could keep themselves alive while the curse lasted, after a while, it expired. Oh, and the other thing about corrupted blood? It was contagious. It would spread between allies from one character to another if they didn't socially distance.

Is this starting to ring any bells? Diseases spread when their carriers move around. It could be fleas on rats in the hold of a sailing ship carrying the black death across the world, or infected air passengers moving coronavirus around at the speed of an airliner. In World of Warcraft, people move even faster. They teleport. Players of World of Warcraft don't pay their subscription fees just so their characters can walk around for weeks on end, and so the game allows characters to teleport instantly

from a dangerous area like Zulgurub to a safe, well-populated city. You can see where this is going. A powerful, infected character could blink out of a Titanic struggle in the heart of Zulgurub and reappear in the middle of a densely populated city spreading the curse. Blizzard Entertainment didn't want that to happen. Corrupted blood was supposed to be a challenge only for those who chose to enter Zulgarub. So, Blizzard's programmers included a line of code

that would automatically cancel the corrupted blood effect at the moment that a character left the battle with Hakkar. BLEEP! Except... for some reason... Corrupted Blood escaped from Zulgarub anyway. In Azeroth's busy cities, it spread to low-level characters who would be dead in a few seconds.

It also spread to the computer-controlled characters that kept the game's economy running in the background. These bot characters were nobody special, market traders, inkeepers, priests or town guards, but in the cities these bots were everywhere. Because it was the simplest way to keep the game running smoothly, these computer characters were programmed to be almost immortal, not a problem, usually. But now, it meant that they could serve as a symptomatic carriers of the curse. Great, now you have these invulnerable extras strolling around in the background of the game, serving drinks and snacks with a

side-order of deadly corrupted blood. The stage was set for the world's first virtual pandemic. It had started in a remote corner of the world and spread to the cities. With hindsight it was all a little prescient. At Tufts University's Centre for Modeling Infectious Diseases, Nina Fefferman's phone rang. It was a student of hers, Eric Lothgren. Lothgren was a keen world of warcraft player, and he and Fefferman had been talking about the game's potential as a research tool.

They weren't the only academics to be interested. Scientists and social scientists were waking up to the possibility that these complex, highly social games might be a terrific source of real-world insight. Economists, for example, were asking, could we study inflation by deliberately flooding a virtual world with gold coins? What would happen, how would people react? An epidemiologist like Lofgren and Feferman were wondering whether they could learn something by persuading a gaming company to unleash a public health emergency on a virtual world.

Although Lofgren was on the other end of the phone line, Feferman could hear that he was excited. "'Log into the game,' said Offgren. "'That thing we were talking about. "'It's happening.'" Corrupted blood was spreading fast. Characters strong enough not to be killed instantly would flee the plague-infested cities, carrying the curse with them. The computer bot characters would stroll around as their programming dictated, looking innocent

but spreading death. And some players curious to see what the fuss was about, sent their characters into infected areas to have a look at the pools of blood and the piles of virtual skeletons. The result was that the curse spread with unimaginable speed. Early in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, before the lockdowns, the number of people infected doubled every two or three days. The number of characters infected with corrupted blood doubled every nine minutes. World of Warcraft seems like one big game that in practice for technical reasons there are lots of parallel game servers, each hosting a few thousand players. Outbreaks happened on different game servers at different times. Whenever they

did, it would take mere hours before every vulnerable character on that server was either dead or hiding somewhere, very remote. The gaming community was a buzz with the news. What was going on? In the first server to be affected, Iron Forge, the dwarven capital was quick to succumb to the plague. Surviving characters just saw piles of skeletons marking where countless others had perished. The capital of the Orcs, Ogrimar, fared no better. Within hours it was overrun, players scrambled to keep their characters out of harm's way. As the epidemiologists, Feferman and Lothgren watched the virtual

pandemic unfold, some of what they saw surprised them. They were amazed to see some characters rushing heroically towards the danger, casting healing spells to try to stop the spread, even at the cost of their own lives. Altruistic players were risking harm to a character they had long cherished, because they wanted to do the right thing. That wasn't something you saw in the epidemiological models. Another surprise was the appearance of what, with hindsight, we might call, play idiots, players who deliberately contracted an infection and spread it around, or who accidentally did so first by recklessly running in to see what the fuss was about and then by running

away again. Corrupted blood, after all, was, like COVID, fairly harmless to some, and deadly to others. And some people don't much care about others. Misinformation circulated. Everyone seemed to be promoting a cure, all the cures were snake oil. And conspiracy theory circulated too. As the players of the game tried to figure out a question that has become all too familiar, did someone do this on purpose? Did the game's designers think it would be fun to introduce an utterly deadly, mind-bendingly transmissible disease into their fantasy world?

Was it a disgruntled employee trying to sabotage the game? Maybe some rogue epidemiologists had whispered into Blizzard's ears and persuaded them to run a grand experiment. Blizzard Entertainment weren't telling. They had their hands full, as their initial puzzlement turned to alarm. It was really scary, said the lead engineer John Cash.

We didn't know why it was happening. Remember that I mentioned that characters had pets. Cats, spiderlings, giant snails, that sort of thing. Well, those pets proved to be the vector for corrupted blood, escaping Zulgarub and spreading in the cities. The programmers had failed to anticipate how that might happen. Much like real-world virologists overlooking some flaw in their biosecurity measures that allows a virus they're studying to accidentally

escape from the lab. Perish the thought. And now, corrupted blood was making the game unplayable. You couldn't do very much in World of Warcraft if you didn't periodically visit the cities, and with the cities piled high with bones and blood. That wasn't very appealing. Blizzard Entertainment tried to organise a voluntary quarantine on the affected game servers. It did not work. Too many players broke the rules.

Blizzard didn't really have the option of imposing a lockdown, who would choose to spend their time being a mythical hero in a magical realm if they're forced to stay at home all day. Blizzard did have one godlike power that sadly wasn't open to human leaders in early 2020. They could take the entire game offline to reset it. They didn't want to do that. It would be disruptive and embarrassing, but World of Warcraft was so complex that its creators weren't sure if there was another way to fix it.

Years later, when Covid began to spread in earnest, there was a flurry of newspaper articles asking what the corrupted blood pandemic might tell us about the real one. A lot said Wyatt magazine, world of warcraft perfectly predicted our coronavirus pandemic. Maybe. Some of the parallels are unsettling. But while the epidemiologists, Eric Lothgren and Nina Fefman did indeed scrutinise the virtual pandemic for real-world insights, they concluded that as scientists, they hadn't learned as much as they'd hoped. Lothgren and Fefman published an article in the Medical Journal, The Lancet, arguing that the world of warcraft plague was a tantalizing, missed opportunity for epidemiologists.

It was too different to a real epidemic and Blizzard Entertainment hadn't shared enough data about what happened. Epidemiologists are still eager to watch realistic plagues unfold inside computer games, but games companies aren't so keen. After a few days, Blizzard decided to bite the bullet. It took the game offline, updated the software and rebooted the service. The corrupted blood plague was over. Our next cautionary tale short deals, not with virtual blood, shared in a computer-generated

world, but the real kind, shared in the most catastrophic way, following a series of seemingly mundane errors. More of that, after the break. Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with MS-13 Nelsabrador? How the Russian mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn in the 1990s? Or what about that time I got lost in the Burmese jungle hunt in the world's biggest meflab? Or why the Japanese Yakuzaev all those crazy dragons had to? I'm Sean Williams. And I'm Danny Gold. And we're the host of the Underworld Hot Caste. We're journalists that

have traveled all over, reporting on dangers, people, and places, and every week we'll be bringing you a new story about organized crime from all over the world. We know this stuff because we've been there, we've seen it, and we've got the near misses and embarrassing tales to go with it. We'll mix in reporting with our own experiences in the field, and we'll throw in some bad jokes while we're at it. The only world podcast explores the criminal underworlds that affect all of our lives, whether we know it or not, available wherever you get your podcasts. A year into the First World War, British soldiers are being sent to fight in Galipoli, in

what's now Northern Turkey. 500 men from the first battalion of the 7th Royal Scots have boarded a train in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the middle of the night. It's taking themselves to Liverpool, England, where a ship is waiting to carry them to the front. They haven't been told where they're going, but they have been issued with sun helmets, so it's not hard to guess. It's an old train. The carriages made from wood and lit by natural gas stored in tanks underneath them. It shouldn't really be in service anymore. Modern trains are made from steel and lit with electric, but this is wartime. One of the soldiers is 18-year-old Peter Stoddard.

We were full of expectation through the night we chatted and played cards, but Peter and his friends aren't going to make it to the bloody battlefield of the lippily. Many won't even get to England. I'm Tim Hafen, and you're listening to cautionary tales. Quintins Hill is a railway junction, just on the Scottish side of the border with England. There's a signal box and four tracks. The two tracks in the middle are the main lines, one going north into Scotland,

one going south to England. And after the side of each main line, there's a loop of track where slow trains can be parked and wait while faster trains can go by. and wait while faster trains can go by. Inside the signal box are rows of great mechanical levers that the signalman throw to operate both the points that allow trains to switch from one track to another and move rightly coloured signal arms up and down the tracks that tell the train drivers to stop and go, a bit like traffic lights on a road. Signalman George Meakin had been on the night shift at Quintin's Hill. At six in the morning he should have handed over to the day shift signalman James Tinsley. Meakin and Tinsley were

friends. They had been doing shifts in this signal box for years, and they had something else in common. Neither enjoyed getting up early in the morning. So they'd agreed between themselves that whoever was on the day shift would sleep for a bit longer and come in at around half past six, not six o'clock sharp. For tinsley, this arrangement had an additional benefit. It meant he could sometimes come to work on a slow local train. Usually that local train went straight past Quintins Hill without stopping, but sometimes the northbound express train from London to Glasgow would be running late,

and that took priority. The slow local train would pull off the mainline onto a loop at Quintins Hill to let the express train go past. That morning, made a 22nd, 1915. James Tinsley hitched a ride to work on the local train. It arrived at Quintin-Sill at half-pass six. George Meakin, in the signal box, had to get it off the Northbound mainline to make way for the delayed express, but he couldn't put it on the side loop because that was already occupied by a freight train. That happened sometimes. So, Meekin switched the north bound local train onto the south bound mainline. He could sit and wait there instead.

The local train ground to a halt. Tinsley hopped off and went up to the signal box to start work for the day. He'd brought the daily newspaper and handed it to Meakin. Meakin handed Tinsley the notes he'd made on a scrap piece of paper about everything he'd done since 6 o'clock. Tinsley would copy them into the official logbook in his own handwriting, so it would appear to their superiors that the ships had changed at 6 o'clock, as the rules said they must. Right mate, here's the situation, Mekin says. There's a good train on the northbound side loop, we've got to clear the northbound

mainline for the express. So I've parked your local train on the southbound mainline as you know. There's an empty coal train going south and I'm sending that to wait on the southbound side loop. And the next train that'll want to come south is a troop train, got it? Well, have you got it? Back on the troop train, the soldiers have started to drift off to sleep. The train rumbles south. It approaches the village of Kirkpatrick, four miles from the border with England. The track starts to slope gently downwards, and the train begins to pick up speed.

At Kirkpatrick station, there's another signal box. An empty coal train has just passed Kirkpatrick going south. At 6.34am, the signal man at Kirkpatrick learns from Quintins Hill that the empty coal train is no longer on the southbound mainline. It's been safely moved onto the loop. He assumes that means the line is clear for the troop train, but he has to check. And this is a time before radio and telephone were widespread.

Messages are sent by a telegraph that rings alarm bells. At 6.43am, asks Quintin's hill, can I send the troop train through? Yes, comes the reply, the tracks clear. But of course, it's not the local train, the train that brought Tinsley to work, is still parked on it. The signal man that Kirk Patrick doesn't know that. parked on it. The signal man that Kirk Patrick doesn't know that. He watches the troop train in purple past. Researchers who study work play safety, sometimes make a distinction between work as imagined and work as done. The idea is that what's written down in training manuals and rulebooks and operating procedures

might not always correspond to what employees actually do in practice. The railway rulebook, for example, says that the night shift ends at 6 o'clock precisely. As we've seen, that's not what happened at Quintin's Hill. Meakin and Tinsley routinely swapped at around half past six instead, but they had to hide that from their superiors. So at 6 o'clock, whoever was on the night shift, stopped writing in the logbook and switched to a scrap of paper instead. The logbook can't tell us who sent that signal at 634 to say that the empty coal train had left the southbound mainline. Meakin will later say he sure was Tinsley. Tinsley thinks it must have been Meakin. No wonder neither of them can remember.

They know that whoever sent that signal should have followed up with another signal to tell Kirk Patrick that the southbound mainline was nonetheless still blocked. Now, by the local train, but nobody does. blocked, now by the local train, but nobody does. The levers in the signal box correspond to the tracks, the main lines and side loops. The rules say that when a track is blocked, the signal one puts a ring or collar on the lever as a visual reminder, some even say, train here in big letters. That's work is imagined by the rule writers. In practice, Meekin and Tinsley didn't bother with it. That's work as done. Whenever a train stops for more than a few minutes, the rules say someone from the train has to visit the signal box to remind the signal

man they're there. Check there's a collar on the lever and sign the logbook to say they've done this. The fireman from the local train signed the logbook. But he didn't check for a collar who uses those. And he didn't feel the need to remind Tinsley that the train was there. After all, Tinsley had only just got off it. If you imagine that work always happens exactly as the rulebook dictates, it's hard to see how any signalman could forget about a train on the line.

When you look at how work was actually done, it becomes less inexplicable. Here's another example. According to the rules, the staff from the trains shouldn't stay in the signal box for a moment longer than necessary to exchange critical information, so as not to risk distracting the signal man from his duties. In practice, they might naturally hang around for a chat. When Tinsley gets to the signal box, the Brakesman from the goods train is there. The rules say Mekin should leave as soon as he comes off duty. But he doesn't, he settles down

to read the newspaper. The fireman from the local train turns up, so does the Brakesman from the empty coal train. Meekin passes on the latest news about the war. When workers done departs from workers imagined like this, who's fault is it? The traditional approach is to blame workers done, but rules can sometimes be cumbersome or unrealistic. Eric Holnagall is an academic who studies safety in the health care sector. He argues that we should always be keen to close the gap between work as done and work as imagined, but we should keep an open mind about whether it's the rules or the behaviour that needs to adapt.

He gives the example of a hospital, whether written procedures say nurses should take blood samples from patients only when a doctor requests them. But nurses routinely take samples from very ill patients before the doctor has arrived, it saves precious time. Should the nurses be reprimanded, or should the rulebook be amended? To close the gap between workers imagined and workers done, managers need to understand what workers actually do. And workers need to feel free to be honest.

If the railway managers knew that the signalman didn't always use the lever collars, they might have come up with a better system. If Meakin and Tinsley had felt free to ask, can we change shifts at 6.30? They wouldn't have needed their sub-tiff used with the logbook. Tinsley sets about copying the entries from Meakins scrap of paper into the logbook. Meakin and the train workers are chatting about the war news. Tinsley hears the signal from Kirk Patrick is the southbound mainline clear.

The lever isn't in the position that would remind him the line is blocked, and he responds without thinking. Yes, the line is clear. The train he arrived on has slipped his mind entirely. On the troop train, 18-year-old Peter Stoddard is jolted away as he's thrown across the carriage. What an earth is going on! Watching from the signal box, a horrified James Tinsley and George Meakin see exactly what's happened. The troop train has plowed into the local train on the southbound mainline.

It was going much too fast to stop in time. The old wooden carriages of the troop train are now scattered zigzag across both tracks. Tinsley and Meekin know what's about to happen too. The late running London to Glasgow Express is powering up the northbound mainline, straight at the debris. It won't be able to stop in time either. In the troop train, Peter Stoddark tries to get up, then tries again, but something is pinning down his left leg. He hears the steam whistle of the express and the desperate screeching of graves. Then everything goes dark.

When Stoddard comes to again, he finds himself halfway down an embankment. It looks up and there was a little lot singing its damned head off, he remembers. I saw my mate a few yards away. He was laughing like hell at me. I put my arms out to him. And it was only his head. His head with his mouth and eyes open. I broke down and started to cry. I don't know for how long. Stoddard gets to his feet and scrambles up the embankment. It's carnage. There are body parts everywhere.

Some soldiers had wriggled free of the troop train into the path of the on-rushing express. Many more are trapped. And they can't be rescued because the wooden carriages are burning fiercely. The crash has punctured the gas cylinders from the hot coals from the steam engine have set the gas a light. Three railway staff died at Quintins Hill and nine passengers from the local train and the express. But it was on the troop train that the heaviest

toll fell. The Royal Scots lost 214 soldiers. Only they blamed the workers, not the rules. They found that work as done was entirely at fault. Meekin and Tinsley were found guilty of culpable homicide, both spent a year in prison. But when they got out, the railway company gave them jobs again. Perhaps the bosses knew, deep down, that their own rules had also been to blame. It's always easy to find fault with workers done.

But workers imagined had played its part two. For a list of our sources see the show notes at timhalford.com. TimHalford.com Corsinary Tales is written by me, Tim Halford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly, with support from Courtney Garino and Emily Vaughn. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss, Julia Barton, edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guthritch, Stella Haaford, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mielebel, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fein, John Schnarrs, Carly Mieleori, Eric Sandler,

Royston Besserv, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano, Daniela Lacan and Maya Canig. Corsinary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. And if you want to hear the show add free and listen to exclusive cautionary tales shorts, then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. Are you interested in stories of power, fame, royalty, and family politics? Hi, I'm Sarah Lyle, a reporter for The New York Times. My new Pushkin audiobook, UnRoyal, is an audio documentary that tells the story of three

powerful women who married into you and were ultimately rejected by the British monarchy, while a Simpson, Diana Spencer, and Meghan Markle. Here, I blend the probing inquisition of your wrong about with the historical intrigue of the crown, serving a delectable royal feast for the years. Check it out at pushkin.fm-slash-un-royal or wherever audiobooks are sold.