Online gamers become guinea pigs
Epidemics uncorked in virtual worlds
When an estimated 4 million people encountered a deadly epidemic called Corrupted Blood that left the landscape strewn with corpses, scientists were intrigued, not horrified. Similarly, when Whypox, a measles-like disease, was unleashed into a community of over 1.2 million young adults, researchers sat back and took notes.
That's because these infections were running rampant through the virtual worlds of massive online communities such as the World of Warcraft and Whyville.net. Serious academic researchers, from epidemiologists to economists, are beginning to think online games and virtual worlds can be new laboratories to observe behavior and test theories they can't experiment with in the real world.
"There's 9 million people playing World of Warcraft every day -- think of the insights you could gain," said Dr. Ran D. Balicer, an epidemiologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. He normally studies pandemic preparedness but recently wrote a paper in the scientific journal Epidemiology on the virtual virus Corrupted Blood in World of Warcraft, a fantasy role-playing game where players do battle with swords, maces, and other weapons. "This is a new evolutionary step in infectious disease modeling."
Researchers are hoping to use virtual worlds to study mass human behavior on a variety of topics, ranging from disease prevention to economic theories such as the law of supply and demand. Studies could be done on existing Web communities or in online worlds developed specifically to test hypotheses.
While video game science is hardly mainstream, some of the scientific community has started to view virtual worlds as an ideal way to conduct tightly controlled experiments. To be sure, games have drawbacks as scientific instruments. The sample pool, usually skewed toward men, doesn't mirror society. The stakes aren't as high -- so people let their characters do things in a game they would never try in real life.
But last month, the journal Science devoted five pages to "The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds" -- replacing the journal's usual graphs and technical close-ups with a picture of the Stormwind Auction House, World of Warcraft's version of
Each online world may be suited to a different research question, the paper concluded. For instance, Second Life, a virtual world inhabited by 9 million players who create online personas called avatars, is an ideal environment for recruiting thousands of research subjects. A scientist can easily build a laboratory in Second Life, create experimental equipment, and even give away virtual incentives like a helicopter to recruit participants.
Yasmin Kafai, associate professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, wanted to study how a disruptive event affected an online community. So Kafai and her team unleashed Whypox -- a virtual epidemic that spread through Whyville, an online site for 8- to 16-year olds.
What would be unthinkable in real life -- purposely infecting people -- became a scientific opportunity. Kafai's team studied how young people learned about and reacted to the pox, which was designed to spread when people were in close contact and caused red spots to pop up on its sneezing victims. They watched as Whyvillians visited the local Centers for Disease Control and collected months of data, concluding that the illness created a new sense of community in an online world dominated by flirting, chatting, and playing.
Unscripted virtual events can also be a potential scientific goldmine.
Corrupted Blood -- a deadly contagion that ripped through World of Warcraft in fall of 2005 after an upgrade to the game -- inspired a detailed examination in two journals. Balicer wrote "Modeling Infectious Diseases Dissemination Through Online Role-Playing Games" in the March issue of Epidemiology, and Tufts University School of Medicine researchers analyzed the epidemic in the September issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
They learned that the Corrupted Blood epidemic had some of the hallmarks of a real plague. The sickness was intended to infect high-level players of World of Warcraft who reached a region of the game called Zul'Gurub and battled a character called Hakkar. Those hale and hardy players were infected with the disease, which was meant to make it harder for them to win the battle.
But because players in the game can teleport to different regions, and pets could carry the disease and infect others, it spread. There were real life parallels -- players' ability to carry the disease to new regions was compared to the spread of SARS by air travel.Animals that carried the disease, causing fresh outbreaks, drew comparisons to birds that can carry avian influenza to new locations.
What interested researchers most, however, were players' reactions.
"Human response is, almost by definition, difficult to predict, requiring experiments on emotionally involved subjects to determine the proportion of the population likely to respond in various ways," the authors wrote in The Lancet Infectious Diseases study.
In the Corrupted Blood outbreak, researchers observed heartening altruistic attempts to heal people. There was also the specter of bioterror in accounts of players who contracted the disease in one part of the game and then intentionally introduced it to a major metropolitan area. Contrary to common sense, some players broke out of quarantine set up by the game's designers or even tried to contract Corrupted Blood to see what it was like.
But researchers stressed caution; virtual worlds may not be the ideal lab of the future. "It's piqued a lot of people's interests -- I think a closer examination needs to be done to see the true value of these environments," said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Children's Hospital Boston.
Social scientists may find online worlds more useful, as a digital petri dish where they can test big ideas, such as whether one government structure is more effective than another or how economies react to market disruptions.
Indiana University economist Edward Castronova plans this fall to launch Arden, a virtual world that he hopes will give social scientists a new way to test political and social theories.
"Down the road, you might have a situation where every government maintains a whole bunch of virtual worlds, trying out variations on its policies to see how they work," said Castronova.
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com. 