Use virtual simulations to predict human behavior in real epidemics

Posted by ljmacphee on September 19, 2007 under artificial intelligence in the news |

Social scientists have really found a gold mine in using artificial communities to simulate real world events. This time we have ‘Corrupted Blood’ rampaging through ‘World of Warcraft’.

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.”

. . . Online gamers become guinea pigs

More information:
Modeling Epidemic Spread in Synthetic Populations - Virtual Plagues in Massive Multiplayer Online Games ( pdf )