The spread of the Corrupted Blood plague has an eerie resonence, right down to the infection pattern involving pets and animals (look up the real world equivilent zoonosis for more info) with the fears of an influenza outbreak, SARS or the Avian flu.
As far as I can tell, Blizzard Entertainment views this as an inadvertant bug and has already begun applying a patch limiting the further spread of the plague but otherwise have said very little.
The Corrupted Blood plague can now join the official "annals of the weird" in online events, right up there with the assassination of Lord British a few years ago in Ultima Online.
Damn, the world gets stranger everytime I close my eyes.
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Article comments
1 - Rich Powers
It's sometimes weird to think how these online worlds can mimic reality in so many different ways. Just look at the economic system in these games. I've read that some programmers in World of Warcraft and Everquest have become "virtual economists." They have to monitor currency and item-value inflation and adjust accordingly, for fear of losing their players to an unstable in-game economy.
Heck, some people make their living off of these virtual economies, selling their spoils on Ebay...
2 - Deano
I understand that a number of professional economists are openly studying some of the online worlds in order to understand the economic structures and the impact of changes to the gameworld. The social impact is probably almost as fascinating.
I recall one article that looked at the initial Ultima online world and the fact that the lack of resources,and economic activity forced most players into specific actions in the game that we not directly intended by the designers - namely a great deal of player-killing, virtual theft etc.
I hope that there is some thesis student out there working on their dissertation...it would be fascinating reading.
3 - JS
If you're interested in virtual economics I can suggest the work of Edward Castronova. He'll have a book out soon called "Synthetic Worlds : The Business and Culture of Online Games".
Recently the Guardian did an interview with the man that you can find at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1573071,00.html
Some of his research papers:
1) Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=294828
2) On Virtual Economies
http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/castronova/