Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: The World of Warcraft Plague

Episode Date: May 26, 2019

This week on Sawbones: A real-world miracle. Justin gets to talk about video games as Dr. Sydnee explores a in-game plague that brought World of Warcraft to its knees.

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. Hello everybody and welcome to Saw Bones, where do a misguided medicine on your co-host Justin McElroy and I'm Sydney McElroy I was so excited

To hear about this episode from Sydney because she said this one's got video games and that that's true This was like a special present. It's not your birthday. It's not almost father's day. Could this be your father's day present that I don't want to. It's not a small account. I was excited because you know, it worked. They all call me the game master. I'm kind of a video game head. Is that what you they call you all video game heads?

Video game heads they call us. And I'm the game master. You're the game master. Yeah, that's one of the nicknames I have because I love video games so much and then Sydney told me it was World Warcraft which is not the worst possible thing the worst possible thing would have been a game that I've never played in my entire life but well by worst you don't mean in quality you mean like in terms of being relevant to your

expertise right you've done like Forex strategy games, or fighting games, or sports games, or there's a lot of games I don't know about them sitting here for the game master. I've got some pretty large swaths of ignorance. Well, you've focused on F and V games. That's my problem, yeah. That you've ignored all these other games.

Well, Warcraft is something I have played a lot. And, but not for a long time. I have what the egg heads call a convictive personality. So when I get into a game like World Warcraft that has no linear end in the way that we all understand it, it can be a little bit of a time suck for your boy hoops. Sure. Try to ignore the old kids, the old ball and chain and the kids and the bathroom and the eating things in our hot pockets.

It makes you enjoy the bathroom. Yeah, the way you used to have it expression for that when you had to review a game really quickly without stopping because the embargo, you You know they do embargo. Yes, yes We use to have an expression if you had to review a game really quickly. You know what we call it? What poop sock in it Poop sock through the game the implication being that you would Poo but a sock rather than stop please it playing you just keep playing and you to poop sock your way through Let's never discuss this again because then inevitably I'd have to ask you if you have, and I don't, I can't.

It's a turning, it's a city city city city city city. I plan on saying, married to you forever, I don't want to know. I've never yelled at you on this program before. Poopsock is a term of art, and you couldn't possibly understand. Okay. Uh,

Well, this is the first time on Sobans that I've ever been disgusted. Well, let me go. It happened. So it happened. There's that. No, you might be wondering why we would be talking about World of Warcraft on a medical history podcast. Well, it was brought to my attention by a wonderful listener who did not sign their

email or else I would thank you by name. There was a time when World of Warcraft helped medicine in a way, helped epidemiologists through the investigation, the study of a virus that spread in the world. Now, I am not, I've never played World of Warcraft, I'm familiar with it in this, I know what it is. You've told me some things about it. But I'm going to rely on you Justin for a lot of the context for these things when it comes to the game part. And then I'll talk about the medicine part. I have just to give, if you're a wow head,

I just put head at the end of everything. A wowser? If you're a wowser, I made it through like, wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm. Well, and that's about where I bailed. I didn't get to like, Mr. Pandaria or Orlords of Drain or Knights of Asivan or Legion or Battle Fraseroth. Which one of those do you think I made up?

I don't. It was the Knights one. I made up? Don't. It was the ninth one. I made that one up. All right. So this was in 2005 that this incident occurred. Yes. I was still, I was still, yes, I was still playing. I was still in.

But you've not heard of this. This is what you told me. So in on September 13th, 2005, Blizzard, who makes, wow. I guess introduced a new raid called Zool Group. Now what does that mean a new raid? Is that a bad guy or is that like a level? A raid is, it's like a big team activity. A raid is something where you bring in a bunch of people and it can last for many hours

and usually you have to be part of a guild, which is large group of players that persistently work together. So it's like a task. No, a raid is like, everything in war will have his tasks. It's like a raid is like a big, in count like a big.

Heist. Heist is better if instead of like, sneakily doing stuff, it was just like a huge battle that you had to like multi-tier. Multi-tiered battle, mini bosses, like a big, like if you think of it, it would be a sort of like a level

in a traditional game, except you have to bring a huge army blin and there's challenges all throughout. And it's supposed to be the things that people do repeatedly at the end of the game to like get more new armor and weapons. All right, so the end boss, Hacar, could use something called corrupted blood on players. And that was a spell or something,

some sort of attack. Attack. I-O-E attack, probably. Which would drain, you would have like an initial damage that it would cause, and then it would slowly drain you of points over time. Right, okay. So it's sort of like an infection. It was like a disease kind of thing, right? Right.

So, and you could also pass it on to other characters. Okay. So it's infectious. That's uncommon in, that's not a common video game idea. Really? Yeah, I didn't know that. You don't know to see that, that often often because you in game design, especially with a massively multiplayer online game, you want to give people a few chances to like grief each other

as possible, which is, you know what I mean by grief, you can probably like mess up the gameplay experience. So giving the ability to like make other people sick is not particularly common in online games. So you could make other people sick and this is really bad for, I guess if your character is a lower level character, it could kill you in in online games. So you could you could make other people sick and this is really bad for I guess if your characters a lower level character, it could kill you in a few seconds. Wolf. If you're a higher level character, you probably could sustain the initial damage and maybe say alive. Eventually, it would go away or you would die as the more common result for a lot of players because it did

like between 250 and 300 points damage, typically, which I guess is a lot. So that all depends on what your level is. between 250 and 300 points damage, typically, which I guess is a lot. That all depends on what your level is. Pursuant to what we were talking about though, that effect makes sense in a raid-type encounter because everyone in there is supposed to be high level. A lot of raids are even created to, like, you can't get in unless you're high enough. And this is, I think this was the part of the idea is that this was supposed to be restricted to the raid.

It was not supposed to be something that was carried outside. It was supposed to be just something so only higher level players would encounter it. That was the idea. Now there was an error where apparently pets could also get this. And if you dismiss your pets, which is something that you can do, so you can have a pet in the game and then you can tell it to go away, I guess. Hey, you got that just from Contextless. If you summoned it again, the pet would still have the illness. Okay. Yes.

Got it. So you dismiss your sick pet, and when it comes back, it's still sick, right? Which is realistic, but I suppose bad for gameplay. Right. Also, NPCs could get it. Okay, that's interesting. Non-playable character. Right.

I knew what that was. Yes. And they were not killed by it the way that your character may be, but they still can spread it. Interesting. Okay, see a lot of times in these games. Okay, so World of Warcraft is interesting because there are two sides. There's Horde and Alliance and the Horde can bust into like Alliance territories and mess people up. But as I understand it, at least when I was

playing, there's a lot of NPCs that can't be killed because you don't want to break the game for people. Right. So there's to be like, there be like, there is a, what's the word for that? Something where disease rests. A disease carrier. They're a disease vector. They're an asymptomatic carrier. Yeah, they're a vector of the disease. They're similar to what we've done

in episode before on typhoid Mary, who was an asymptomatic carrier of the disease and could give people typhoid, but did not suffer from the symptoms herself. So these NPCs could give you the disease, the pets could spread the disease, and then you could spread the disease to other players as well. And it should have again, it should have been limited by the fact that only high player character, high level characters could get into this raid and so, and you were only supposed

to get it in the raid. But it, three of the servers were affected by the kind of programming I guess errors or whatever that led to this. And so what happened was this corrupted blood disease spread throughout the world of warcraft. What is the name of the world? What the world of warcraft? Is it a name for it? Does it have like a fanciful name? New Jersey. Okay. Weirdly enough. And there were, there were bodies laying in the streets,

according to posters, thank you, during the time, people who were talking about it on forums and trying to figure out what to do, described like bones littering the streets of the cities, because so many people were dying so quickly and it was spreading so far. And my understanding is that, well, if you die in wow, it's not a permanent death but it is not advantageous. If you die in a while, you die in real life.

That's what's actually at stakes here. Wow is the matrix. Wow is the matrix. Oh my gosh. Sydney, I haven't been to make a lot of jokes this episode and I just want to warn everybody, I'm going to continue to do this, not make jokes. Me talking to you about video games and for the first time in my marriage, I think actually having you listen to what I'm saying and process it is giving me an

intense pleasure that I have not experienced before in my adult life. And I'm really trying to save every moment of it. I don't, I've turned off the part of my brain that does jokes. I just want to talk to you about video games and have you listen to me with an open heart and it is blowing my mind right now. Well, live it up, boyfriend. I am living it up. I am loving every second of it. No jokes, just pleasure. All right. So because of this, the normal way that players would engage with the game was obviously disrupted. And I want to talk about the way everybody reacted to it. There was a lot of panic. Blizzard tried to address it with like a voluntary quarantine. Oh, that's so cool.

Within the game. But like, except it would require. It was voluntary. And so it's not, it's not a million years. I mean, this is like, this is a world where people can't even have like an online,

it was once a, I'm not gonna remember all the specifics because it was, I mean was more than a decade ago, but some characters try to have an online funeral because the players... I remember that person had died in real life. And it was rated, not rated in the sense that we think of, like we were just talking about,

but like attacked by the horde. I can't even remember. I still don't laugh at that. Well, and that's a terrible thing. I'm laughing because that's online world. No one's going to do a voluntary quarantine. No one's going to do anything they don't want to have the people are gold farting bots. But what you're talking about is what's so interesting about this is that much

like in real life, some people obeyed the quarantine. Some people said, yeah, whatever. I'm not taking that seriously, I'm not going to do that. And then there were some people who were like, all right, panic. How can I use this to my advantage? And even as they tried to put different security measures in to stem the spread of the disease, the's thing, the idea that you could summon a pet who would have the disease and you didn't necessarily know that

or the people around them didn't, kept spreading it. The animals really acted as vectors for the disease too. So the problem was finally fixed by a, what is, I guess, is called a hard reset. Yes. Like the world was set back a a hard reset. Mm-hmm. Yes. Like the world was set back a week or something. Yeah.

Essentially. Yes. What happened was vanished. It's probably they reverted to online games get patched as they go. Yeah. And when I'm guessing that is it like was that they reverted to the version of the game that existed before this thing was added, would be my guess, whether you have a hard reset there, because they're not going to reset

everybody's like players and characters and levels and everything. Yeah. And they also, they also, it ended by the way on October 8th, and it also made pets unable to be affected. And that was a big key in stopping it. Now, as a result of this, there were major towns and cities that had been abandoned in the game. People were like spreading out to the country side. There's a lot of debate after it, like was this intentional, was this a stunt, was this to get a lot of press, Blizzard has always maintained it was an accident and we're sorry and we just

wanted to fix it. And that was it. They also maintain this is just a game because everything I'm going to talk about next, all the stuff, the real life stuff that has stemmed from it. Blizzard, I don't think once a part of as they will tell you over and over again, wow is a game. The stuff that happens is a game. We're just playing. It is not real, and we in no way are trying to mimic real life. Right. But this situation has now been used as a model for disease outbreaks by real life, actual scientists and doctors and epidemiologists who study the spread of disease.

Because what's interesting about studying the spread of disease is that there's a lot of stuff we can account for and predict using mathematical models. One of the things that's really difficult to predict with a mathematical model is human behavior, because humans do your thing when encountered with, or when encountered with some sort of challenge or struggle or something frightening. And so what they saw in this outbreak online was a good model for exactly how a diverse group of humans from all over the place, all different walks of life might react to a situation like

that. So, and I mean, this would be the only way you could study something like this very well, because if you think about it, the alternative would be, well, let's give a bunch of people a disease and then write down what they do. Well, that's not your own, I can't funding for that. No, that's unethical. I don't think, I don't think you're going to get IRB approval for that kind of study. So and also like that's bad. That's just human bad, not just scientists bad. Like that kind of study. So, and also, that's bad.

That's just human bad, not just scientists bad. That's human bad, we don't do that. So, epidemiologists and anti-terrorism experts, as we'll get into, have studied this wow corrupted blood incident and their published papers on this to try to predict the way an outbreak might occur in real life. And I want to talk about some of their ideas. Okay. But before we do that, no, let's head to the billion department. Ah, let's go. The medicines, the medicines that ask you let my God before the mouth. Without capers. So Justin, yes, Yes, Andy.

A lot of the players in the game responded to the outbreak, to the epidemic, in ways that I think it's fair to say humans respond to real world outbreaks. Some of these we know, they're documented ways people respond and then others were interesting observations. So, some characters tried to heal others. I guess some characters have healing abilities. And so some would rush to the aid of infected players. Some who were lower level characters,

and maybe that would put them at great risk, would like volunteer to direct people away from those areas, would like, I guess, stand somewhere where they could say, like, don't go there. It's dangerous over there. You could die over there. It's a fascinating thing because these are the second half of the MO RPG is RPG and it's role-playing games. And I think that a lot of times when you see unusual activities and sometimes there's stuff that's in the game. Sometimes they're not. Players will often play roles that aren't necessarily gameplay mandated, right? Like the heal, like characters healing, right? There's not really a big penalty for, for dying, right?

And wow, I don't know at this time there may be be I don't know, but it wasn't a big deal at least it wasn't like everquest where your experience is gonna get knocked out anyway. It wasn't as big of a deal, but the characters who could heal had a real world application for that healing that wasn't we're fighting a dragon. Let me heal you so we can kill the dragon right people really responded that like people really like like like When tell in ever quest I remember people who could teleport Druids and some other classes would open up like Transportation like taxi services basically where it's like I will port you to this place if you give me this amount of gold and And their platinum probably platinum is expensive service, but like I will port you around and like, we'll respond really well to that.

Players will like create their own gameplay when something like this happens. Well, that's what made this interesting to a lot of epidemiologists is that they saw some characters do what you would kind of predict in an outbreak is they would they would flee to somewhere that didn't have the infection, right? I'm going to get out of the city. I'm going to go where there's no sickness. There were some characters who actually seemed to be attempting to spread the disease intentionally, but a lot of people reacted as if this was a real disease, like as if their life was actually at risk. Their character reacted in an intense way that kind of transcended the idea of a game. So because of all these correlations, there were some epidemiologists, Rand Ballacer, Eric,

Lofgren, and Nina Feferman, who between the three of them wrote a collection of different papers and studies all in the same year that advocated this as a model for using virtual worlds to predict human behavior in actual outbreaks. So kind of using, not saying that we should do all of our research based on this one incident, but look how well this worked as a model. We should do this to model disease outbreaks so that we can better understand the way that people might react so we can better understand the way that people might react, so we can better assist in these kinds of situations.

So, as an example, Balser published a paper and mentioned the correlations between the corrupted blood incident and avian flu and SARS. You can find correlations because the bird flu was spread by asymptomatic ducks. Much like this was spread by pets. In the case of the corrupted blood, it was a very similar kind of, you could follow that model where the ducks went and spread the disease and where the pets went and spread the disease. In both cases, they tried to quarantine the thing and it didn't work. They compared airplanes as a source of spreading the disease globally in actual outbreaks, things like SARS and avian flu to teleportation and world of warcraft, where they both demonstrate how we now have

an ability in the real world to get from one place to another place that's very far away and spread the disease there that we didn't use to have. Yeah, that's true. Well, it seems like a cool way of doing this because you, it's like the perfect balance between like people do care. Like you couldn't set this up as an experiment on us, right? Because no one would ever care about their squiggly line person. You know what I mean?

Without any stakes, no one would react in the way that they normally would. The only reason it worked is because, and they talk about this a lot, as you get into, especially Feferman, her papers, as you get into that, she talks about her papers, as you get into that, she talks about the connection that people have with their characters in world of war, crafting probably in a lot of other games too, but specifically in this world, it's not

just a game, but it's not just a game. And it is that investment that players have in their character that makes it a good model. If they didn't, you're exactly right. It wouldn't work because you would do things that you wouldn't do in real life. But people tended to react in ways that were more consistent with how you would react to a real outbreak. So in, in Feverman and Lofgren's papers, they kind of talk about the things that math can't predict because even the animal spread, we could still do mathematical models for or airplane travel, that kind of talk about the things that math can't predict. Because even the animal spread, we could still do mathematical models for or airplane travel, that kind of thing.

But when you look at irrational behavior, that's a whole other matter. So as a result of this, Fefferman has started using like simulations that are built on, like in her epidemiological studies, that are built on things she observed in this corrupted blood incident, making virtual pandemics.

She even was trying to get Blizzard to work with her to make games that would model this as a great way for us to study this. She spoke at the 2008 Games for Health Conference and the 2011 game developers conference about this. She spoke at the 2008 Games for Health Conference and the 2011 game developers conference about this. DC in the biz. Yes. We call it. Some again, some of the things that she talks about specifically are players putting themselves

at risk because they're trying to heal people and then getting infected, which is a great model for healthcare workers. But also for in disease outbreaks, it's not just healthcare workers or people with some sort of medical background who might go to assist and then become exposed. Family members take care of each other or friends or community members, you know, who care for the sick and then become infected.

And so you have that very, you know, clear correlation between real life and the game. Right. The other thing is that what they found in the game is that by extending the lives, by healing these players who were sick, by trying to help them, you were actually furthering the spread of the disease. Oh, wow. Because they're staying alive longer to keep spreading it.

Oh, interestingly. Which was another thing that they had not accounted for predicted before. As I mentioned, anti-terrorism experts became interested in this because there were some players who intentionally went and infected other players. And they began thinking, like, could this be a good model for a biological weapon, for how you might spread a biological weapon, how someone might intentionally try to infect other people. So Charles Blair, the deputy director of the Center of Terrorism and Intelligent Studies, was really interested in this and wanted to analyze this as a way to explore how a biological weapon might be spread. They even this was such a problem that initially Infected players were asked to flag themselves to try to prevent the spread of the disease like if you're infected Just I don't know how you flag yourself Because there's probably a

Thing that appears on the screen that shows yeah, maybe I don't know what to like it But some uninfected players started flagging themselves as infected so that people wouldn't intentionally make them sick. I don't know how you would do that. Maybe like you do the clothing. There's like labels and stuff, but the labels I think are stuff that Blizzard makes. I don't know. Well, they may have made something.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Some, some of the users would still have their infected characters go to work because I guess you work in World of Warcraft? You can in the market. You know what, it might have been in the bizarre, you could like set your character to like be in a centralized trading location.

That's what they said in the market, you could work there. And they said this was a really interesting thing because in disease outbreaks, there is a there is a percentage of people who are going to go to work sick. And in fact, others as a result. Yeah. And this was something that you're still yeah. And then you you add on to, especially as a big problem in the US, people who don't have sick days who can't get off work just because they're ill, who are going to go to work and, you know work because they have no other choice. And so these are all things that they could model.

They found that some players were attempting to sell fake cures to other players to take advantage of it and benefit off it. Now you're in a real house for sure. I thought that was perfect for Sabons, the idea that even in a virtual world, there are just some people who can't help, but sell snake oil when they get the opportunity. That's hilarious. sawbuns, the idea that even in a virtual world, there are just some people who can't help, but sell snake oil when they get the opportunity.

That's hilarious. And then there was the other observation that the epidemiologist made is what Feferman likes to call the stupid factor. I don't, I hate that term, I don't like that term. I don't think, I think that this is a very normal. I don't know. I have a lot of sympathy for think that this is a very normal. I don't know. I have a lot of sympathy for this. This is a very normal human reaction.

There were a lot of people who logged on to go check out the epidemic because they heard about it and they were interested to see what was happening. I guess it's what people would call, I've heard other people call, looky-loos. Like, accidents. Yeah. People who just want to kind of see what happened

and as a result because of that curiosity, they would get infected and then spread the disease as well. It's like a misunderstanding though of why people, like if you heard about something like this happening, right? And you weren't currently playing World of Warcraft. You'd log on and check it out. You'd log on and check it out. And mainly because people want to be be like these are worlds with histories and like you want to be someone who said like

yeah I was there for the corrupted blood epidemic and yeah I got it and it was wild and you should have been that like people like to be a part of big happenings in MMOs for sure. And this also accounts for not just people who are curious, but it accounts for in real life, there are a lot of people who are going to go into disease outbreak sites who put themselves at risk. For example, journalists, journalists often are reporting on these matters and might be exposed. And that is not a, that is not out of, you know,

unintelligence, that is their job. That exact thing that you described probably happened, because I imagine anybody, everybody was covering a lot back then, pretty closely. So like, there were probably sites like, Joyce Dick at the time or Katakir, would have you that sent in people.

In an outbreak, we'll send in teams of epidemiologists, people who research outbreaks to try to figure out the best way to control it. Those are people who are put at risk too. In addition to obviously the healthcare workers who might be carrying directly for people, there are people who are studying the outbreak who are put at risk. And this was an interesting model for that as well. People who didn't necessarily have to be infected but put themselves into a position where they could become infected. The other thing that they noted was that there was not a lot of information or guidance given initially from the game developers. So as they tried to figure out how to stop it, a lot of players were left to try to figure it out on their own. And the kind of confusion and panic that resulted from no information coming from the authorities is a very instructive tool for epidemiologists who will tell you that that is that is a

problem in real world outbreaks if they're occurring and there is no information or guidance being given by government bodies or health organizations that kind of thing. It's really crucial that you get on top of that and inform people because people who are Uninformed and feel like they're that something is happening and nobody knows about it are much more likely to react in Less than advantageous ways. You know your rational ways Now there are other researchers who took exception to all this and said Yeah, that's all really neat and those are cool papers you wrote and, they're going to get published because it's about a video game outbreak.

And, you know, and journals are going to love that. And scientists are going to think it's really neat. But this is not real. This is a game. There was this terrorism expert Stewart Gottlieb, who at Yale, who said, death in World of Warcraft is a nuisance at most, which is a point being that like, it's not like real death.

It's just, you know, so why would we even begin to think that, you know, real morality and real fear of death and all that would apply to a game? But again, other scientists, Dr. Sherry Terkel of MIT says, you know, but it's, it becomes part of, for some players, it becomes part of their real life. Their, their wildlife and their real life are very closely entertained, entangled. And so it's totally valid to use these kinds of, you know, virtual models to discuss how actual humans in real life might respond. It's hard because the answer is somewhere in between

both of them, right? And this is the problem with like, if you're not someone who is ingrained in this, like the truth is in the middle, because the level of, and maybe the, like the level of player investment is gonna differ from person to person. Like some people get out of these games just to grief people and just to be agents of chaos and just to like mess stuff up. Some people are very invested and wanna do the best

for like wanna breathe life into their characters and like do things the way they would do them, etc. Which is probably a good model for humanity. Like, we are varied in that same way, I think. Exactly. But I think since you can't account for that, you're not like, it's hard to use it. I think it's a one to one comparison for like happy people would react in the day to life. Cause like, there are probably some people, not everybody who likes griefing players would probably enjoy that in the real world.

That's exactly what it was. It was a vice versa, honestly. Right, and that's what the Gatley Ab was making the point. Like just because somebody might gleefully spread corrupted blood to other players in World of Warcraft does not mean that they are going to go out got me I was making the point like just because somebody might gleefully spread corrupted blood to other players in world of warcraft does not mean that they are going to go out and cause a bioterrorism event. I mean that's a that would be a wild extrapolation and I agree with that completely. But I do think if you have something like human behavior that you

can't easily map out with algorithms. Seeing these kinds of things play out can be very instructive because when outbreaks happen people do do irrational things and some of those things are irrational behaviors that can be predicted that we could guess are going to happen and then sometimes we don't see them coming. I don't think we would assume that an outbreak, there will be a group of people who would self-fake cures for the outbreak necessarily. But after I read that, I thought, oh, well, that would definitely happen. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Of course, of course.

And that would, and that, and if you think about what, what is the result of that other than that it's, it's horrible and it's immoral and it's dangerous and it's mean other than all that, if people think they're being cured, what are they, I mean, what do they do then? Do they tell other people? Do they avoid other cures? Do they get sicker? Do they spread it further? Do we, I mean, you know, there are all kinds of repercussions of these behaviors. And so I think it's a really interesting thing. Blizzard disagrees. They're just, again, they're like, it's a game. It's a game. Blizzard disagrees. They're just again, they're like, it's a game.

It's a game. No, it's interesting. So, so don't please do not put all this science stuff on us. We're just trying to make a fun game for you. But the epidemiologists persist. They still are trying to work through, you know, the CDC and various institutions to use these things a little more effectively, these virtual models as a way to chart epidemics. And a lot of it stems from this wow corrupted blood incident.

There's a, there are other examples of this. There's a game called eWonline, which is absolutely gigantic that has its own enrolled economy. It's a spaceship game. Has an enrolled economy where like players can amass real wealth that is like substantial actual wealth that does map to our money. Like that can be like people can sell stuff off and stuff like that. And there's been a lot of studies done on the economy of EVON line because it is so gigantic and deep that like that it goes through dips that there crashes and you know stuff like that. through dips that there are crashes and stuff like that. So it's an interesting way of being able to study this stuff in a little bit of a vacuum, I think.

Absolutely. No, can I tell you the side effect of this episode? You know what I wanna go do right now? You wanna play wow? I wanna play wow, Sydney, don't you miss it? I never played it. Remember when you would go to sleep and I would give the laptop on and just play wow.

Where are you? I was back then. I didn't have kids. You do now. You're not playing wow. I love you. I'm just gonna dip in. No, you can't.

I just want to dip in. No, it's the same reason we have to be careful about keeping boxes of cereal in the house, honey. Mm, just going to dip me on real quick. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. And thank you, Sydney, for listening to me talk about video games with an intensity that is unmatched for the rest of our marriage.

Hopefully we can do it again real soon. Thank you for the context so that I understood this interesting scientific episode. Thank you to this expert. You know, I should play what if it happens again or something like it. Don't you want your first-hand reporter, Justin Scoop's Macroi on the scene.

I should be playing in case something else like this happens. If we hear about this happening, then I'll allow it. Okay. Thanks to the taxpayers for the use of their song medicines as the intro and outro of our program. Thank you to the maximum fun network that has had us as a part of their family for quite a while now.

And we are so happy to be here. Thank you to you. Hey, we have a book, Sabones, the book, they call it. Yeah, because it's a book. Yeah, because it's a book. It's on Amazon. You can get it on book.

And there's also an audiobook version. If you want Sydney and I to- You can get it on book. That's how humans start. Get on Amazon. And there's an audiobook version. If you want to buy CDs of Sydney and I reading our book, go for it.

It's all there for you. Folks, that is going to do it for us this week. So until next time, my name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't Joe a hole in your head! Alright!