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

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

A very long time ago, in 2019, we talked about the Corrupted Blood plague, a pandemic within the World of Warcraft. How it affected the digital world was used as a model for how people might behave during an actual real-life pandemic. Well . . . we’ve got that real-life pandemic now. So how did it actually play out (and is still playing out) versus how it went in-game?Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers https://taxpayers.bandcamp.com/

Saw bones 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, talk is about books. One, two, one, two, three, four. Hello everybody and welcome to Soppons. for the mouth. Hello everybody and welcome to Sobhons. A marital tour of misguided medicine.

I'm a co-host just Macri. And I'm Sydney Macri. Nice. I was hoping it would be you. I'm sitting directly across the world. All of the co-hosts on Sobhons, you are my favorite. Are you doing Sobbons without me? Are there, are there rogue sob bones?

I do three to four sobons per week in a good week. I do three to four sobons. I do, well, it's different regions. I find that very upsetting. I forget if I'm doing American sobons. Oh, I also do British sobons, don't I? And then sobons. Go ahead, what other accents go ahead um what you

got you do some Australian for me she we watch a lot of blueie come on um oh what is that noise oh oh it's so bad yeah that's so British. Yeah. That's it. Soul booms in Transylvania. Okay. All right. There's different regions of solbona. You got a Canadian solbona for me. Hey.

Hmm. I'm surprised you didn't try to rename it like a dragonstan and shark tank. Yeah. Yeah. That would be, they do have different names. Don't. Don't. I see the glimmeringib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib glib gl gl glib glib gl glib gl glib gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl gl was an interesting one, not a new topic, an old topic, reapplied to new events. Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, you count all the different. Oh, okay, I was gonna say.

All right, yes. All the secret ones, I don't know about. We did an episode way back then on World of Warcraft and a plague that occurred within the game. Yes, I remember, I press hit the episode. It was, we didn't know it at the time. But what Bailey pointed out is it would be interesting to apply

what we talked about theoretically what we learned in that episode to the events of the last couple years. And I thought that might be a fun way to revisit it. Not fun. Fun isn't the word. That's not the word. But interesting. Because at the time when we did that episode, we talked about how the events of in this world of warcraft plague were used to sort of theorize what a real life, you know, pandemic would look like. And a lot of people, as we talked about in that episode, disagreed.

Like, well, I don't know. This seems a little far-fetched. So who was right? And now we have the data. Who knew? We would have it so quickly. How lucky. You don't have to have it that well. No, but we can.

OK, so first of all, just to rehash, and again, this episode is still, you can listen to it, for the full accounting of this event. Right. But to breathe, that's probably going to be a little weird, a bit of a weird one to listen to at this point, as many of our pre-coit episodes are. So to kind of rehash what happened, there was an epidemic that started on September 13th, 2005. And this is what I'm going to have to talk about World Warcraft as if I understand all of these things

I'm about to say, and Justin is gonna have to give context. I will try. It's been a long time since I played World Warcraft. So Blizzard introduced a new raid called Zool Group into the game. Okay. It was an update. It's in Strangleform Vale, if you the game. Okay. It was an update.

It's in Strangleform Vale, if you're curious. Okay. The end boss, Hacker, could use a debuff. Yeah, I love the slang you're tossing around, Zid. And a debuff is a spell. A spell, yes. Is that right? Well, a debuff is technically like,

it's the, a buff is like something that makes you run faster, it makes you heal better, it makes you hit harder. Oh, okay. A debuff is the opposite of it. It makes your stats worse. Okay. The debuff. All right, makes you hit softer.

Makes you hit more gently. You can, you can, you've limited me. That kind of deal. And then you can, okay, so this was called corrupted blood. That didn't have to be one of the more, um, uh, our flagging stuff. I have to read them recording. Okay, we can do that. Let's record first. Uh, so corrupted blood would kill kill, kill characters, um, like over time, like it would slowly like with nature damage. Give you damage. There's a name for that.

Oh, a dot damage over time. Okay. All right. And it basically like how fast you died, depending on how high your level was. Right. So like lower level characters. Oh, that's a bit reductive, but how high your hit points are, which different character classes have different hit points are, which different character classes have a different hit points

etc So you lived a varying amount of time Okay, and it could be passed on to other characters. Okay, it's contagious That's key here. It usually did between 250 and 300 points damage Okay damage. Okay. Pets could also get it. And even if you would dismiss your pet, which I guess is a thing you can do in World of Warcraft, the pets still like had it. Like if you summoned them, they would still have it. It didn't make it go away. Okay. Now beyond that, you could also give it to NPCs, non-playable characters. I know that. Okay. NPCs aren't going to die. They can get it, but they're not going to be killed

by it, but they can spread it. Okay. Basically, this plague gets released into World of Warcraft as the point. And- This was probably it's worth noting, I'm guessing. It's a bug because this effect should have been something that affected you in the raid itself, but not something that you brought out of the raid, right? So something was not worth it. It was intended.

But it, as you have said, you could carry it out. And basically everybody started dying of this plague. And it was sort of destroying the game. You know, people were very upset because you couldn't, I mean, if you got it, there was not much you could do about it. You were sort of doomed. And everybody was carrying it. And NPC could do about it. You were sort of doomed and everybody was carrying it and NPCs were carrying it and pets were carrying it. And at one point there were like hundreds of bodies littering the streets of towns and cities all throughout World of Warcraft. Like not actual bodies like...

Digital bodies. Digital bodies. That would be weird if they had actual human corpses in the video game world of Warcraft. What do you talk? I mean, I know you're a nice person. I mean, when I said that, like that sentence is very disturbing, but then if you take it in context,

it's a computer game. It's less disturbing. It's more, oh. And of course, it is okay. Like any video game or computer game, when you die, you can come back, but like it takes a toll on your. What point status. I don't know.

Like it's bad for your play. It's bad for game. I'm not going to cry to any work. I enjoy this too much. Go ahead. Yeah. It's bad for your play because you lose your. It's like you're fling.

Like you're playinging. Like you're fling back in. Anyway, so what was interesting about this is that Blizzard tried to do a bunch of stuff to like fix it because everybody's mad. So first they attempted a voluntary quarantine. So okay, look, if you have it, please stay in your digital hut, I don't know digital home your thatched roof. I imagine that's roofs are part of this game I'm certain yeah, okay, it just feels right to me. Yeah, I don't know But they always do they always do clarify everything in the game is being digital That's good answer is really good point. They always say like meet me in my digital hut I have a digital bed there

I'll be wearing digital clothes and we could eat some digital food So they with our digital non real corpses littering the streets. They try to voluntary quarantine But like people didn't take it seriously Can you imagine? They told people it's a good idea to stay home and not go out into crowds, but some people didn't take it seriously and did it anyway. I see what I see what we're doing here. Yes.

Okay. The other thing that started to happen is major towns and cities began to become abandoned. And this, I guess, affected gameplay as well, because you couldn't, there was nobody running like your stores or whatnot, or like there was nobody there. Like, you couldn't interact with other players, you couldn't do anything. It harmed sort of the way the game was structured, because there's stuff that's supposed to happen, I guess,

in cities, business, and whatnot. Stuff does happen, yeah. And nothing was happening, because nobody was guess, in cities, business, and whatnot. Stuff does happen. Nothing was happening because nobody was there because everybody ran away because they all sort of ran to the countryside leaving the urban areas filled with dead people and nothing else. Wait, real dead people are not going to do this anymore. The play ended October 8th, 2005, when Blizzard made pets unable to be affected and there by rendering it unable to exist outside of SoulGroob. They ended up at one point, they had to do like hard resets on servers to fix a lot of

it. Yeah, it was a big deal. Some people tried to say that this was just a stunt or maybe something intentional. Oh, digital trying to cook to that but a digital lab. Yes, some people became sort of conspiracy theorists that this was intentionally.

I mean, I don't know what a computer game context for that would be, but in real life, I guess to start sort of making this comparison. Obviously, the quarantine comparison is easy to make. In real life, a lot of people began to suspect that COVID was either a lie, right? We had a lot of COVID deniers. And then people who... Very generous of you using the past tense, appreciate that.

We have. And then people who also decided that, well, it's real, but it was leaked from a lab and made intentionally to kill everybody. It's a biological weapon, right? So a lot of that definitely happened. And after this happened in the game, there were epidemiologists. There were people who decided, like, I want to use this as something we can study. Because the hard part about studying diseases in theory,

communicable diseases is that mathematical models are really good and we've learned this in COVID. We talked all the last two years about like the concept of the R0, how many people is a sick person going to spread something to, right? Spread spread spread it like how many other people are going to get infected and a lot of that is dependent on what they do. Like yes disease characteristics come into play right like how how easily is it spread and how long are you coming up with a typical human being and their behavior in the way they were spent that respond to an atypical situation right So what will someone do in this situation that will affect how many other people are going to catch it from them? And this was a great thing to study, or at least some people argued that at the time, because we are seeing, you know, people react in real time, and this is something that math is limited in its ability to predict.

Because we have to factor in the idea that sometimes humans do illogical things. Right. Right. So player response is varied, but that thought was that these are real world behaviors. Okay. Some characters, for instance, with healing abilities would go try to heal characters that were sick. That's so great. There's a great market for that. That's a great way to make a few extra platt.

Platt. Well, I mean, yeah, people are always looking for healers. Now, if you want to play them, oh no, I'm, I have more to talk about. You see, when I played as a druid in other places, okay, we're not gonna gonna we would offer to teleport people for like 30 platinum will teleport him to go quarkite river. How much longer do I have to let you go? Just that long actually. Okay, perfect. But as you can imagine, if you are a healer and you're running to the place where the sick people are, you're at risk for getting sick.

Which our front line responders of World Warcraft. Exactly, which is something that would be hard to model, but we can see, we saw play out in COVID, especially in the very first wave, where we were short on personal protective equipment. And we are hospitals were overwhelmed in a lot of areas, especially in large urban areas. And we had a lot of healthcare workers contracting the virus because they were doing their job.

They were trying to help people. And so that they were some of the first people who were put at high risk as a result. So we definitely saw that play out in real life. There were also people who would try to like steer people away from infected areas. Some characters would, like some people would intentionally like, I'm going to go where it's safer. I'm going to go hide my house, right?

I'm going to go on lockdown. Other people like continued to try to get the disease and spread it to other people? That actually tracks. I think we'd call that griefing or trolling. And I mean, you know, the theory about that at the time was nobody would ever actually engage in behavior to get a disease. Ah. This was the thought. And this is all conserved.

As we're gonna talk about, this is why the idea of using this as a model for how people react was kind of controversial, is the thought was, well, you know that you're not really going to die. Like, this is different. This is fake. This isn't real. And so while there were people who took it seriously and were like, I don't want to get corrupted blood, I'm going to go hide somewhere. There were other people who sort of ran to it and got it just to sort of be part of the thing. And a lot of critics said, well, no one would do that.

But I think what we saw with COVID is not, and what we continue to see, is not so much the idea I want to get COVID so that I'm part of it, right? I mean, maybe- That doesn't seem to be, I mean, maybe in people's subconscious, but I don't think COVID so that I'm part of it, right? I mean, maybe that doesn't seem to be, I mean, maybe in people subconscious, but I don't think that's been a large part of the narrative. I'm not going to say humans are weird and so probably someone somewhere, right? Like, that's true for everything, probably someone somewhere. Oh, for sure.

But overarching, the reason that we did see people at least act with so much abandon that it was almost as if they were trying to get COVID. Was this idea of herd immunity that got put out there so early? The idea that the faster we all get it and get over it, the faster we achieve herd immunity and the faster we can get on with our economy, I think was the idea. In you heard it in the beginning, too, Do you remember that for just a moment early in COVID, it was suggested by our leaders

that maybe we need to sacrifice our elderly to save the economy? Do you remember this? That maybe elderly people need to accept that this is a time to give back. Yeah, to take one for the team. And nobody said it overtly. It certainly implied though.

But it was implied. Sacrifice your olds. That, you know, but I mean, the stock market's really hurt and guys. So, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not just the stock market. We didn't call you the greatest generation for nothing. They closed Disney World. So, I mean, it's not just the stock market. We didn't call you the greatest generation for nothing.

They closed Disney World. So, I mean, it was pretty serious. So, I mean, the idea that nobody would ever intentionally or act with a band and or we wouldn't have that expectation, I mean, that is part of a pandemic. Sometimes in a pandemic, people go out and get infected.

There are probably people who after they got the vaccine did try to swerve into COVID. I bet there's a subset of people that did that just to be like, yeah, yeah, I got it. Yeah. There were two epidemiologists, three, but two that were going to continue to talk about Eric Loughgren and Nina Feferman, who wrote a lot of papers,

also, ran about aales or Did, but I want to talk mainly about Loughgren and Feferman because they continue to write about this and we're going to talk about some updates. They have also looked back on their work in light of recent events and done a lot of the same thing we're doing right now. But before we do that, let's go to the Bill and Department. Let's go. The medicines, the medicines, the escalate macabre for the mound. Max Fundrive is just around the corner. 2022.

Starting April 25th, it's the best time of the year to support your favorite shows by becoming a Max Fun member, or upgrading your membership. Just two weeks. We've got some great episodes and amazing thank-you gifts in store. And who knows, maybe a few surprises. Don't forget bonus content. So make sure to tune in starting Monday, April 25th, to get all the juicy details on what each show has in store.

Actually, wait, what are the details anyway? And why are they juicy? That's kind of a strange advocate to describe the details. Look, it's a rough world out there, especially lately, I get it. So let's take care of our minds as best we can. I'm John Moe, host of Depresh Mode with John Moe. Every week I talk with comedians, actors, writers, musicians, doctors, therapists, and everyday folks about the obstacles that are world and our brains throw in front of us.

Depression, anxiety, traumatic stress, all those mental health challenges that are way more common and more treatable than you might think. The first time I went to therapy I was so ashamed and I was like, can't believe I got to go in a therapy like I thought I could be a man. And hopefully, Bokar was never in therapy. And then my dad said, yeah, but he smoked a carton of cigarettes a day. Give your mind a break, give yourself a break and join me for depression mode with John Mo. Sid, you're going to talk about kind of like updates to this to this case.

What's what's been happening since since in the light of COVID? So what was interesting is that these three epidemiologists that I already mentioned wrote papers at the time when this originally happened, comparing these, what happened in World of Warcraft to historical epidemics or pandemics. So like Ballester mentioned it in relation to avian flu and SARS, which was a press on. Same kind of idea because animals were involved and it had the potential for rapid to avian flu and SARS, which is a pression. Same kind of idea because animals were involved and it had the potential for rapid global spread

and just like this and that was one sort of perspective. Was like, look at this past plague, this really connects to that. There was another paper where Feferman and Lothgren just sort of went into like, instead of comparing it to old plagues, talked about how this could really be revolutionary as a way to predict future pandemic human behavior. Because as we talked about, that's hard to do sometimes with mathematical modeling. So they had started working on some more like simulations and things like that at the time.

That would show how this might play out where we ever to have a global pandemic with this kind of thing. So some of the things that they had predicted are that we need to look if we do have a pandemic, we need to look at the idea that some people will put themselves at risk, like healthcare workers, but that then they will get sick and that they are at risk of infecting others, right? The other thing that they talked about was that if we have something that is contagious

for a longer period of time, if we take great pains to keep people alive, which we should, but that the consequence of that is the whole time they're alive, they're communicable. So we extend the time that people can be exposed, and we saw this happening in hospitals, right? And then, on the other hand, like I said, some people were just infecting other people,

willingily, because they were going about their life. In some cases, they were just going about their life. You know, they didn't want to stop going to cities and doing what I mean what do you do in world of work craft? Sell things fight people Tip set it tip. Is there other others? Or do you make a weapon? No, I don't know try to think about I think you're asking if you can fight people and talk Um, just like the world just like real life. You could they gave the option at one point to flag yourself if you were infected.

Oh, really? But it was optional. It, which calls to mind, like, so then you start thinking like, well, in a real pandemic, if there was a way, if you knew instantly, and there was a way to make sure other people knew you had COVID, would you make sure, until I mean, wouldn't you do that? Like, surely you wouldn't go out into the world. In fact, people, if you knew you had COVID, but how many, how many articles have we read during the pandemic of people getting on airplanes knowing they had COVID and exposing everybody in the airplane to COVID. We've heard these things over and over again. If people going into group settings and parties and public transportation with COVID,

knowing they had it, which again was something that like you wouldn't predict if you were thinking of humans as essentially rational creatures. Yeah. Well, they should have been disabused of that notion quite some time ago. It shouldn't have taken COVID to do that. The, the other thing they argued is that a lot of people were just

going out to like work. To, I guess you make money that way. You can have jobs and make money. Your work is killing stuff and mining and doing that kind of thing. So yeah, so we're being at the auction house. There's a place where you go to sell your wares, where you have to post up, then you get pretty crowded.

Some people continue to go to work. And again, the thought was like, if you're sick, you won't go to work. Well, what we all learned again during COVID is that if you're sick, maybe you don't want to go to work, but often you're expected to. I mean, as cobalt's aren't going to slay themselves in, so I'm just going to get out there and get those crush bone belts and etc. Well, and I think a lot of essential workers would testify to that, that they were, I mean, yes, we don't want you to come spread COVID, but also you're essential. And I know there were many times

throughout the pandemic where the restrictions on how sick you had to be, how tested, you had to be all that stuff sort of. Got a looser. Got looser. Sometimes demanded that, yeah. Well, and I think the much publicized in the last sort of big spike that we had with Oma

Cron, um, healthcare workers who were positive, but had been vaccinated only had to stay home for what five days and then could go back. As long as they were asymptomatic or or had been 24 hours out of fever or whatever getting better better. So all of a sudden, we had people that, in the beginning of the pandemic, we would absolutely not have considered allowing to leave their homes. Yeah. We're urging them to get back to work faster and not only get back to work,

to get back to the hospitals. That's been a long way, yeah, right. Full of sick, you know, at risk, vulnerable people are. Some people attempted to self-fake cures during the correct blood incident. Now we're talking. You know, this is not a surprising one. I feel like if you're trying to like model out what happens during a plague, you didn't need COVID to tell you that this happens. All of, we've been doing this.

Of course, COVID has brought us some really wild new additions to the collection of fake pandemic cures. We've got deworming medicines. I've remecting is up there. Oliander, that the pillow guy told us we should all take. Remember the poison, Oli, the my pillow guy. I heard that. I heard that.

I heard that. I heard that. I heard that. I heard that. I heard that. I heard that. I heard that. I heard that.

I heard that. I heard that. I heard that. I heard that. I heard that. I heard that. I heard that. I heard that.

I heard that. I heard that. I heard light, wouldn't there be a way that we could put light in a, sorry. We're not quite there yet Sydney. We can't quite, yeah, we're not quite there yet. Maybe after 20, 24 passes by with that incident. And all sorts of like supplements and vitamins. I mean, I know that there are a lot of people, I heard for a while, they're saying like,

well, if you just take vitamin D, you'll be fine. And that was base, and again, these are all based on such species connections like well we think it hits people who have low vitamin D a little harder but that doesn't mean that taking vitamin D will prevent you from getting COVID. Yeah. There are there also was uh Feferman wrote about at the time what he called the stupid factor. Okay. I'm sorry if you find that term offensive. It is what he called it. It is what he called it.

But basically like people who would be curious about the disease and want to kind of go check out places where it was. Fair. I mean, yeah, that seemed to be. I don't know. Do you think people were doing that much? I mean, do you think that sort of intentional, like, let me go put it around? I don't know if Do you think people were doing that much? I mean, do you think that sort of intentional, like, let me go put it around?

I don't know if people were going, I, I, I mean, we do that during national disasters. I don't see why this would be any different. I don't know. I mean, I really think, I think what it, what they were talking about was the idea that you cannot predict human behavior on using like logical rational.

Like, you cannot assume that every human is going to put their continued survival at the top of their list at all times. That doesn't mean that everybody doesn't want to live essentially. But your order of priorities will shift and continuing to live is not always right at the top of your thoughts. The other things will take precedent at the moment, and maybe underneath it, you still have this larger goal, but other things get in the way,

sometimes without your choice, and then sometimes because you just really wanted to go on spring break, I don't know. I mean, that happened too, right? Like there were people who just really wanted to go to get on the throttest. They just really wanted to, so they did. So they just did it.

And mathematical models also don't account for things like journalists, or like I said, doctors or public health researchers, people who might just get closer than they should to the whole thing. And like I said, this was controversial because there were other researchers who basically said, none of this is applicable to real life because death in the world of warcraft is not death in real life.

So whatever players did in response to a fake death cannot be applied to how humans act in the face of real death. So like I said, the idea that everybody just agreed this would, you know, this would happen was not true. However, here we are, and the researchers, especially Lofgren and Fafferman, have been interviewed throughout the pandemic. I found multiple articles where somebody remembered this and called them and said, hey, how do you feel watching this play out?

You know, yeah, right. You know, and basically, I mean, their response is, we told you so. You know, this was our concern, and they were actually called upon to be part of some of the, and I don't even think it was necessarily because of this work they did, because they're epidemiologists, and this is what they do. But they were taking part in some of the modeling that happened with COVID, and they said this,

like, all of this irrational behavior that we saw during World of Warcraft, not maybe not every single thing to the last letter. You can see a lot of that mimicked in our response to COVID. That just like, you know, and I think that what's interesting is that it tells us two things. One, it tells us that looking to these sorts of things as models of how, you know, diseases, how humans react to disease, not just how diseases are spread, but how human behavior will inform the continued spread or lack of spread of a disease. But I think it's also interesting that at the time there were people who argued, yes, this is a game and yes yes death and a game is of course not equivalent to death in real life

But the players who are really involved in wow Are not making that distinction Emotionally there there are many of them who maybe everybody's involved. I'm not saying it's the same thing I am not saying that but but they're making decisions. There's probably some, but like, that some of their making decisions on an emotional level that are equal to some of the decisions on an emotional level we would make in real life is what I'm saying.

I'm not saying that people believe the game is real. You're applying some delusion. I know, but it's... No, I'm not saying they're delusional at all. Games are designed to bypass the part of your brain that tells you like this is not real. So like you do buy in in much the same way that you get scared by a scary movie. Right. On an emotional level, you're responding to this similarly to the way you'd respond

to real life. That is what I'm saying. For sure. I don't mean I do not mean that anyone playing world of warcraft thinks it's real life. I know that they don't or even cares as much as they do about. No, but it's triggering an emotional response in you. Right. That is not. Um, I just got to stand up for we the gamers said you understand this is not offensive. I know, but us, the gamers have been so maligned over the years that we, the gamers have to stand together against scientific types who think we can't tell reality from what I am saying, below the game you you likened it to horror movies and I think that the point that I would make is we have accepted for a long time

that a really well-made piece of art or media can have a huge emotional impact on us, right? We accept that with like looking at, you know, Michael Antelope's David, you know, or looking at a da Vinci or listening to your favorite symphony. You know, we accept that we can have some sort of. Dominique, Dominique, choose. We all know my bias towards music with words. But my point is, we have all accepted that these things have deep emotional responses. And the video games obviously can do that too. That is all I'm saying.

That's a defense of games that I just put out there. As you're always doing, defending us the gamers. Well, thank you, Cindy, that's interesting. Yeah, but I thought it was really interesting. You can find, like I said, they mainly interviewed, they mainly interviewed these researchers sort of in the beginning of the pandemic, like a lot of these articles are from 2020. And they're still sort of guessing, like at that point, they're like, we're starting to see some things that you predicted in your research. And, you know, that, and they were like, well, yeah, because, you know, uh, feframents said it's not just that people were role-playing,

people were being themselves in the game. And so, when they then were faced with this in real life, they continue to be themselves. But there are definitely many, many parallels that you could draw between COVID-19 and the corrupted blood incident. So, the question that Bailey asked, and we've had other people email in to mention this because certainly when we did that episode,

I was not thinking how real. Yeah, how real would we get? It would become, but I think it is an interesting argument that using something like that, using some sort of open world role-playing game. Yeah. That accurate. Sure. That's all good stuff.

That's all good stuff. Sure. That's all good stuff. Because the research they were trying to get going back then, that Blizzard wasn't really thrilled about because the whole thing was kind of a debacle. But that research is worthwhile. Yeah. Because if we had listened to these epidemial just a little closer back when all of this originally happened. Who knows? I don't know. Maybe we would have been a little less shocked at how we all sort of went,

you know. Bananas. Bonkers. Thanks for listening to Solbund. We hope you enjoyed yourself. Thanks to the taxpayers for you. So there's song medicines. This is the intro and outro program.

We got a book called The Solbund's Book. Yes, we do. We get books, you know. It's an audio book too. If that's more your speed, I assume you like listening to us talk because you're listening to us talk. But that is going to do it for us until next time.

My name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. As always, don't drill a hole in your head. Alright! Maximumfun.org Comedy and Culture Artist-owned? Audience-supported. you