Imaginary Worlds - Fighting a Virtual Pandemic

Episode Date: April 2, 2020

In 2005, the multiplayer online game World of Warcraft was taken over by a virus called Corrupted Blood, and the virtual pandemic in this fantasy world played out remarkably like COVID-19. I talk with epidemiologist and gamer Eric Lofgren, NYU game design instructor Alexander King and longtime player Virginia Wilkerson about the parallels between the pandemic in World of Warcraft the one we’re facing in the real world, and what lessons we can learn by studying how players reacted to a virtual virus. Also if you want to submit a story for our upcoming toys episode, email us at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Before beginning the show, I want to do a special call-out for submissions for a future Imaginary Worlds episode. We've all had a favorite toy. A stuffed animal, doll, action figure, or even a playset from our favorite childhood cartoon or movie. It's a toy that brought us hours of joy. It's probably got some wear and tear, but it's still loved. hours of joy. It's probably got some wear and tear, but it's still loved. Toys from our childhood can serve as reminders of happier times, connecting us with our past and making us feel safe. Sometimes these toys have wonderful stories attached to them, and we want to hear those stories. Do you still have a toy from when you were younger that you hold on to? What does it mean to you? Why is it so important? Is it a reminder of a specific person or just a sense of comfort when the adult world feels overwhelming or frightening? And is it something that you share with your children? If you have a

story like that, let us know by emailing us at contact at imaginaryworldspodcast.org. We will be accepting submissions until Friday, April 10th. And if your story fits with our outline for the show, we may contact you about an interview. Thanks. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. When you log on to a video game like Fortnite or Call of Duty,

you know that most of the other characters you see on screen are being controlled by other players somewhere in the world. I mean, that's pretty standard. But one of the first games to do that, a massive global scale was World of Warcraft. Now, World of Warcraft is kind of like an online digital version of Dungeons and Dragons. You choose a type of creature to play, like an orc or a dwarf or a human, and then you choose a skill set or a class, like a warlock or a mage. After that, you can do what you want. You can send your character on quests.

You can fight other players or trade with them. And the more you play, the more you level up and gain power. Virginia Wilkerson is getting a master's degree in game design. And when she was a teenager, she was really into World of Warcraft. Her character was a druid. I'd just been leveling up. And while you're leveling up, you're just following quest chain to quest chain. And in September of 2005, she was about to log on to join her brothers, who were also playing the game.

They were talking about what's going on. There are all these bones. Everybody in Ironforge is dead. Ironforge is one of the major cities in World of Warcraft. I was like, that's, you know, that's weird. But so I logged in. I went to Ironforge to check it out. And lo and behold, there are all of these bones everywhere.

Because when your character dies, that's what you leave behind. And then you go and you resurrect at a graveyard to run back and get your body. And it was just, it was the weirdest thing because nobody really like knew sort of what was, or I didn't know what was going on. It turns out World of Warcraft was under siege from a virus called corrupted blood. And if you're thinking that sounds familiar, Virginia started feeling deja vu months ago. When it was in China and they were trying to quarantine everything. I mean, it's sort of weird to compare it to that online experience, but I

mean, you know, I talked to people shortly after like that started happening. I was like, oh my God, this is like the corrupted blood incident. They're like, what is that? It's like, glad you asked. Eric Lofgren is a professor at Washington State University. Back in 2005, he was also playing World of Warcraft in his spare time. Although he didn't have a lot of spare time back then because he was getting a degree studying infectious diseases. He says the crisis began when Blizzard, the company that makes World of Warcraft,

opened up a new realm for players. The final villain you had to defeat in that realm was a snake demon who could cast a spell on you called Corrupted Blood. Now, a spell or a curse is not supposed to have an effect on your character after the battle is over with. But Corrupted Blood had a coding glitch in the software. The problem was, is that several sorts of characters in the game,

so particularly warlocks and a group called hunters, both have sort of companions that fight with them. In the case of warlocks, they're sort of summoned demons. And in the case of hunters, they're sort of loyal pets. in the case of hunters they're sort of loyal pets so you can think about for example the game of thrones analogy is one of the stark's direwolves would be fighting alongside these characters and those pets could also get sick and what would happen is if you got rid of those pets during the fight so you said okay you're sick i don't want you to die um and essentially dismissed them when When you brought them back, they would still have the infection. But what happened

was is then players returned to major cities, brought their pets back, their pets had this infection, and then they started spreading it again. Now, every video game has non-playing characters or NPCs that are not controlled by players. They're controlled by the game itself. In World of Warcraft, the NPCs are townsfolk, guards, or shopkeepers. Alexander King teaches game design at NYU, and he says the crazy thing is that the NPCs caught the virus, and they're everywhere. The NPCs in the game were set to have extremely high hit points and were just like really robust so that characters couldn't beat them up and stuff like that. So the disease is never going to kill them. And so the NPCs who just stand around and respond to

player prompts, they're just there, are now these like disease vectors and are the asymptomatic carriers of the disease. And when your character gets the virus? So when you get infected, because it's a video game, you have this sort of spectacularly gory fountain of blood that comes out of you to tell you you're infected and your health starts ticking down. ticking down. If you were somebody who'd been playing for a long time, to the point where you had leveled up and you obtained a lot of wealth and health in the game, the virus would not kill your character. If you're a low-level character, that same amount of health ticks away from you, but you don't have as much, so you can potentially simply die. Virginia Wilkerson was one of those casual players who did not have the spare time to build up a lot of health in the game. Oh, yeah, I died all the time.

And so, I mean, I learned pretty quick, just like I've got to, you have to like resurrect at a graveyard instead of usually like when you die, you run, you start at a graveyard and then you run back to your body where you can resurrect in the same place that you died. But if you can't do that, if you lose your body or for whatever reason, you can just resurrect at the graveyard. And there were a bunch of people there. And that's when I sort of was like, what's up with everybody dying all the time? This is a question that not only players and game designers are trying to figure out, but eventually epidemiologists like Eric Lofgren realized there was a lot to learn by studying this virtual pandemic. Because it turns out the way the virus

played out in the game was more true to life than many realistic science fiction movies about pandemics. And if we go deep into how the crisis unfolded in World of Warcraft, that can help guide us through the crisis we're going through now in the real world. We will begin our quest years after the Corrupted Blood incident, Eric Lofgren co-authored an academic paper with the epidemiologist Nina Pfefferman about how World of Warcraft helped them understand how a pandemic could play out in the real world. And their focus was not how the virus spread, but how people reacted to it. Typically, when they studied pandemics, they only had a few historic cases to observe.

And nothing at that time had become a global pandemic in the way that COVID-19 is now. So they had to rely pretty heavily on mathematical models with hypothetical people. In all of those things, we have this sort of omniscient view of the world, but the people in our studies will only do what we tell them to. So we don't have the opportunity to add sort of unexpected chaos. In other words, the people in the mathematical models were programmed to behave rationally, or what epidemiologists would consider rationally. But World of Warcraft is a virtual environment. Most of the characters are being controlled by real people, and Eric's team could study

how that behavior played out in real time. In 2007, their academic paper got a lot of attention. Now it's turned out to be more prophetic than they ever realized. So let's go over the parallels. First, in the game, the corrupted blood virus jumped from animals to humans. And in the real world, epidemiologists think the same thing happened with COVID-19. Somehow a bat in China infected a human. That's led to scapegoating in the U.S. and other white majority countries, where people have been verbally or physically assaulting anyone who looks East Asian.

Now, the situation in World of Warcraft in 2005 is not as serious as what's going on now in our world. But it was similar in that a subset of players were being blamed for starting the crisis. They're called hunters, and their digital pets were the first to catch the virus and spread it to everyone else. It's a problem whenever you have a disease that is attributable to a particular group or faction, or in this case, yeah, like if you didn't have hunters pets, you wouldn't have had this problem. But that's a, you know, a single thing that doesn't actually carry much past that initial introduction event. After that, it's sort of a societal level problem.

But yeah, you do see a degree of scapegoating. Alexander King, who teaches game design, says in both cases the problem isn't a lack of information, but finding correct information in a sea of misinformation. a lack of information, but finding correct information in a sea of misinformation. And like today, players in World of Warcraft were trading conspiracy theories online. They thought the company had made the virus intentionally, or maybe it was an act of sabotage by an angry employee. And like today, there were fake cures. There were sort of snake today. unprecedented and inexplicable, people will start inventing, you know, whatever explanation they can and telling other people about that explanation. As I mentioned, World of Warcraft was one of the first massive multiplayer online games where everybody was interconnected. Eric says that's

another reason why the virus spread so quickly. In the real medieval world, a plague would spread as fast as horse travel. But in this magical medieval world, people could teleport anywhere. Teleportation is very similar to, honestly, air travel at this point. Because while it is instant, and that's not real, the disease sort of has a, everything is compressed in time. So what's actually important is that you be able to get from point A to point B before your infection has resolved or before you know you're infected. And for coronavirus, air travel is fast enough that you can be across the world before you know you're infected. And for corrupted blood, it was definitely, you could be, you know, across the world before what was a relatively short duration spell.

across the world before what was a relatively short duration spell. It was easy to catch the virus. Your character could get it just by standing next to another player who had it. The game company Blizzard essentially told everyone to practice social distancing, but a lot of people didn't want to. I mean, what made the game so much fun was that you could interact with other players. So there was a lot of selfish behavior. But one of the things that surprised Eric and his colleagues when they studied this incident, and this is something they had never predicted in their mathematical models, is that

some high-level players went on altruistic missions to seek out infected players and heal them with their magical powers. Now, one of the consequences of that is by healing someone, you yourself get infected. So again, you see a lot of parallels to how a lot of healthcare workers are experiencing emerging infectious diseases like this new coronavirus is that their profession and their sort of calling to help other people ends up exposing them to a disease and is potentially very serious for their own health. people ends up exposing them to a disease and is potentially very serious for their own health. As I mentioned earlier, the inequality in the game among players in terms of health and wealth determined who could recover from the virus and who could not, another parallel to the real world.

And some high-level players were doing something that was so cynical and so mean-spirited, Eric Lofgren and his colleagues took notice. It was a practice called griefing. So the idea behind griefing is that there are players in the game who essentially are causing trouble. And one of the things you could do in this particular setting is get people sick. So how you infect people in the game was determined by how close you were to somebody. So if you went and got infected and then just ran to other people, you would be able to infect them. And if they were low level players, they would die. You also had like the anti-griefers that were like,

listen, everybody's trying to play this game. You're going around, you're ruining everybody's fun. Stop it. And Virginia says, okay, we do not have an exact equivalent to griefing in real life except in very, very rare circumstances. But it's not about one-to-one comparisons. It's about the difference between people who understand the risks and repercussions of their behavior and are willing to limit their needs for the sake of the greater good. And then you have people that don't take it seriously at all because they don't really see how important it is to other people.

They're really just focused on their enjoyment of the game. And if this isn't impacting their enjoyment of the game, then they don't really care about anything else. It mimics society in so many ways, which is very interesting. And doesn't others. I mean, people live life for different reasons and people play video games for many different reasons. I'm sort of like a, a skill and achievement based player.

Like I want to, I want to be the best at my class that I can be. And then there are people that play purely for social reasons that aren't interested in going to like the high level raids or really even like maxing out their characters. Then you have people that are a small subset of people that just play for like the economics of the auction house in world of warcraft and they have lots of people that play uh for the role playing like it's dungeons and dragons or something like something similar to that yeah it's interesting because i mean it's it sounds like everybody is doing there is going to the game for different things this is

one of those rare moments where all these players that normally would be sort of siloed from each other just based on their own choices, it's affecting everybody in the whole game. Yeah, absolutely. There was no escape. It really didn't matter how isolated you made yourself, you know, unless you just, you know, camped out on top of a mountain

for a few weeks, in which case you weren't really playing the game. Now you can come back to life after your character dies, but the whole process of having to keep resurrecting your character was driving players away. So, I mean, like I sort of logged in and out temporarily while it was happening, just be like, is it over yet? No. How long in this quest chain can I get before I get infected again?

The corrupted blood incident went on for weeks. During that time, Alexander King says, the economy of the game came to a grinding halt. The cities in the game are forming the sort of hubs of the whole play experience. So it's where you would go to get quests, to buy and sell loot and buy equipment, and also find other players to group up with to do all the content that requires groups of people. So in the short term, the economy is basically suspended. They're all of the normal types of activities that you would want to do,

and especially the market content, like buying and selling items in the economy. All of that just can't take place. The game company Blizzard tried to put through minor fixes and patches to stop the virus. Nothing worked. So they finally resorted to a solution that we do not have in real life. And sadly, that's where the parallels end. Blizzard just starts instituting hard resets on the servers that are affected and then they issue a patch where pets can no longer be infected by corrupted blood

and then that sort of immediately ends the epidemic. And then the economy recovers. I think had they not been able to revert to that patch for some reason, this would have been very bad for the game. I think it would have been pretty grim.

What's not present in the corrupted blood incident is the sort of institutional mismanagement. Blizzard handles the situation quickly and effectively. They're aware of the problem right away. They try a bunch of things, it doesn't work, and eventually they fix it in a relatively quick order. That makes me wish I lived in a virtual world. I mean, the only tools we have at our disposal at this point

is to hunker down, self-isolate, and follow the guidelines that are laid out by experts. But the non-compliant behavior of people in this crisis did not come as a surprise to epidemiologists like Eric Lofgren. They were ready to fight that attitude, partially because they had studied the corrupted blood incident. And I think one of the things that we're seeing in parallel is that a lot of people don't take infection seriously

if it is not personally a risk for them. So you see a lot of people talking about coronavirus and they're like, well, I'm young, I'm healthy. The mortality rate isn't that high for me. So why should I care? And I think in the corrupted blood case, there was a lot of that similar thing where, you know, okay, this is bad if you're high level, but it's not all that big a deal. But the server is being destroyed by this epidemic. The economy has been crippled. You can't go to the major cities. Everybody, can we cooperate for a little bit and get rid of this? Is, I think, sort of the important parallel there.

Games are all about choices, under controlled circumstances. Even when a puzzle or a challenge seems impossible to solve, we know the answer is in there somewhere because somebody is in control of this game. Otherwise it's a crisis. Now interestingly, once Corrupted Blood had become part of the game's history, the players got nostalgic about the thrill of survival that they felt. And three years later, Blizzard introduced a zombie virus into the game to see if they could have the same experience in a controlled environment. And other multiplayer games tried to introduce their own versions of a pandemic.

Alexander King says it actually opened up a new level of, quote, emergent gameplay, which leaves room for players to act unpredictably designing emergent effects or what we sometimes call second order design problems where you're not designing something for what immediately happens but you're designing something that causes effects and and that those secondorder effects produce interesting behavior is very difficult. It's like having good emergent behavior in a game system is an extremely hard and interesting design problem. It's a difficult design problem because by the time those games come out,

every type of behavior has been anticipated by the game developers. The players don't have as many choices as they might have wanted. And if they act out in ways like griefing, the game designers are ready to squash that behavior. I mean, it's the classic philosophical debate between freedom and responsibility. But I think that what you're going for, like why you would want that, is actually to, as a designer, and like when you're designing sort of virtual communities, is you want these kind of interesting behaviors that happen that real people do. When I try to imagine a future in which this crisis will be part of our history,

I've been wondering, how will our behavior change? So I asked Eric Lofgren, how did Corrupted Blood change World of Warcraft? One of the things that I think is the most important for something like Corrupted Blood is you are now much less bound to particular spaces in the game. It's much less dependent on being in a capital city to trade, being in a capital city to find groups to adventure with. So for example, right now, if you want to go on one of these multi-person group adventures, wherever you are in the world, you just bring up a menu. You say, yeah, I want to go do a particular thing. You're instantly, a group is basically instantly matched with you. You are

teleported to that place. You do the thing and then you are teleported back to wherever you were. So you lose, I think, an aspect of the sort of social cohesion that very early World of Warcraft depended on where in order to find a group to do something, you'd have to sit in the chat room of the capital city and say, hey, I want to go do this thing. Does anybody else want to do it with me? We all need to, you know, take essentially a griffin or a wyvern, which are flying monsters that act as airplanes, essentially. You know, you've, I think we've lost a little bit of that. So I think there's somewhat less of the sort of both gestalt community spirit in the game now. And I think also less dependence. I think that

if you had a bug like Corrupted Blood now in the game, it would be a much less big deal because you really don't have to be anywhere. Even in this virtual world, people were interacting more virtually than ever. My life has been very virtual ever since I began working on this podcast full time. And the one thing I really miss about working in an office is the level of human contact. And as someone who spends a lot of time online, I've been concerned for a while about how we treat other people on social media in ways that we never would in person.

I mean, it's a subject I've come back to a lot on this podcast. And now we're all trying to be safe by moving our interactions online. But as we see from the corrupted blood incident, virtual spaces aren't necessarily safe spaces. Although Virginia did not need a virus to tell her that. The more you expose yourself on a virtual platform, the more open you are to harassment. You know, I'm thankful that I've experienced relatively little as a woman

that's online, quote unquote, like a gamer person. But yeah, I mean, there's really nothing as a woman online that you can do to sort of mitigate something. Because if you get offended, then people get mad at you for being offended. But if you stay silent, then it keeps on happening. Eric Lofgren has also been thinking about how society will change as we behave more like gamers, interacting with each other primarily through our avatars. How do you deal with that level of isolation? And so I actually think that the story from Corrupted Blood is a good one,

is that there are online communities, and there are people who engage with each other online in a way that carries emotional weight. People were upset when their characters died even though it carries very little consequence for them. People were engaging with each other. People were talking to each other. story that there is at the time, and I think that's even more true now, a degree of social connectivity in virtual spaces that I think will help people actually get through suddenly being confronted with the fact that working from home means you might not see anybody in the average course of your day and the sort of cadence of life gets disrupted. And so there are things like that that I think that these online virtual spaces help sort of build a sense of community that can act at least partially as a surrogate

for the human contact we're going to be losing as we're talking about massive social distancing as a way to help control coronavirus. And this crisis is redefining and putting to the test what counts as human contact. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Eric Lofgren, Alexander King, and Virginia Wilkerson. By the way, if you want to hear another story about a massive multiplayer online game spilling out into the real world, I did an episode in 2017 about the players that went to war against each other in the game EVE Online.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and Imagine Worlds Pod. If you really like the show, please leave a review in iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. But what really helps people discover the show is social media.

So if you really like it, please post about it. The best way to support Imaginary Worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you can get free Imaginary Worlds stickers, a mug, T-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account,

which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can learn more at imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Fellow board members, we have a problem. Somebody in the World of Warcraft is ignoring the world's rules. On a lighter note, if you want to virtually experience a crisis in World of Warcraft without even logging on, you can come on down to South Park. One year after the corrupted blood incident,

they partnered with Blizzard to do a crossover episode. There are over 7 million people who log on to World of Warcraft. Are you telling me all those people's characters are going to die and there's nothing we can do to save them? Yes, and it won't be long before everyone gets really, really frustrated and stops playing altogether. Gentlemen, this could very well lead to the end of the world of Warcraft. No! No!