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Epidemic, plague and outbreak are words that we dread to hear being announced over mass media and for good reason. They are usually accompanied with warnings to stay home and keep clean and all the other preventive measures to avoid contracting whatever it is that is going around. As a matter of fact, we Malaysians have had our share of ‘problems’ over recent years; JE, SARS, Avian Flu and more recently the Dengue fever. Having established this familiarity with the word, how many have heard of a plague in the cyberworld?

I was browsing the papers today and came across an interesting article that piqued my curiousity. Searching the net, I found this BBC article that documented the spread of a virtual plague (known as Corrupted Blood) in Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft (WoW). Read the article if you want to know how it spread and then then visit Blizzard’s WoW site for details on the game. No point going into that. What is interesting to know is that such anomalies exist in the virtual world.

MMPORPGs are the in thing these days (and have been so for a couple of years). More often than not, the draw for players is the ability to live another life and to do what they invariably can’t in the real world. There is a certain degree of realism in such games but more often than not, the players assume the roles of strong heroes and heroines. Death only comes by the sword and rarely if ever by an accidentally contracted desease. Few would play a game if you died of plague the moment you logged into your account. Does this outbreak signify anything important in the virtual world?

As of this post, only some servers are affected by the epidemic. It’d be interesting to see how the WoW gaming community in general will react if all the servers were infected. Blizzard is apparently working to patch and fix this anomaly but I think the better move might be to tone down the effects of Corrupted Blood but leave it in place. Instead of a patch fix, create a cure and hide it within the millions of lines of code and allow the gamers to roleplay and quest for its discovery.

Call it an experiment in social enginnering. Would gamers put aside their differences and guild wars to work together to discover the cure before it is too late? Or would the plague simply wipe out WoW? Will players stop playing the game or would they forge on?

However tempting this might be, it is doubtful that Blizzard would risk the popularity of their game over curiousity. It is more likely that a proverbial silver bullet will be introduced before too much time has passed. Very soon, everyone will be cured, all the servers cleaned and the whole incident forgotten. No one ever liked a plague anyway :>

On a side note, there are other virtual worlds that mirror the real world in terms of reality. This just happens to be one that I am aware of.