The online role-playing game World of Warcraft is 20 years old. The MMORPG WoW has changed the world of video games significantly. But one incident was so big that it even had an impact on the real world.
What kind of bug was that? In 2005, the final boss of the then popular WoW raid Zul’Gurub, Hakkar, had a special ability: He inflicted the “blood plague” on players, which then spread to other players and killed them slowly and irrevocably. The blood plague was a timer: “Kill the boss before the plague kills you all.”
But what Blizzard didn’t foresee: players could take this plague from the raid into the open world of WoW.
Once unleashed on the free world, the plague continued to spread, killing tens of thousands of players across all servers. The capitals were filled with thousands of players, all suffering from the blood plague.
WoW celebrates 20 years of the highlights of Azeroth
More videos
Autoplay
Researchers investigated blood plague in WoW
How did this affect the real world? Back in 2007, researchers realized how valuable the WoW plague was, because even though this plague only occurred virtually, scientists could draw insights into how a crowd or society would behave if it encountered a real pandemic.
The data that scientists collected for years looking at the WoW plague then became useful in 2020 when the coronavirus became a global pandemic.
In a lengthy report from PC Gamer, scientists like Dr. Eric Lofgren (Washington State University), how her years of study of the blood disease now influenced her research on social behavior in the corona virus:
For me, this was a good example of how important it is to understand people’s behavior. How people respond to public health emergencies and how those responses really influence the course of events. We often think of epidemics as something that just happens to people. There’s a virus that’s doing things.
But in reality it is a virus that spreads between people, and how people interact and behave and obey or disobey authority figures are all very important things. And also that these things are very chaotic. You can’t really predict, “Oh yeah, everyone’s going to quarantine. It’ll be fine.”
People thought: In the real world, people would be more sensible
Lofgren also explains: At that time, the phenomenon of “griefing” was observed in WoW, i.e. people deliberately and maliciously infecting others. Critics said: Nobody would ever do something like that in the real world:
They may not intentionally make people sick, but willfully ignoring the risk of making others sick is pretty close. There are people who say, “Oh, it’s no big deal, I’m not going to change my behavior.” I’ll go to the concert and then visit my old grandma.” Maybe you shouldn’t do that. This is an important insight. Epidemics are a social problem… Downplaying the seriousness of something is a form of real-life griefing.
Almost 20 years after its outbreak, the blood plague is still one of the most important events in WoW, and other games like Star Wars: The Old Republic also found the effects of the bug so exciting that they brought their own plague into the MMORPG. Blizzard itself immortalized the blood plague many years later in a map in Hearthstone: How an ancient WoW plague quickly infected Hearthstone