Back in 2005, there was a little bug in the online game World of Warcraft. In a higher level battle in the Zul’Gurub dungeon instance, the boss Hakkar casted a “Corrupted Blood” spell. The spell dealt substantial damage over time, intended for higher level characters in battle.
Due to a glitch in Blizzard’s code, “Corrupted Blood” was carried outside of the dungeon, through players’ pets. If these pets were infected and in one of World of Warcraft’s major cities, anyone in a close proximity became infected. It was pretty much an “instant-kill” with lower level characters.
A group of infectious disease researchers have researched this in-game pandemic, and will be publishing a study in the Lancet Infectious Disease Journal in September. They studied how Blizzard tried to quarantine the bug, the players that acted as “disease” carriers, and the “stupid” factor – the curious that had see what was going on.
Information gathered from this WOW bug, will be used to further study the impact of real world infectious diseases.
Fox News has the full story:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,293920,00.html
http://www.wowwiki.com/Corrupted_Blood
Posted on August 27th, 2007 by LinkDECAY