Learning from virtual plagues
Published: 17 Oct 2005 13:00 BST
When Erik Jacobson fell victim to a recent plague that ravaged the online game "World of Warcraft" (WoW) and caused his character to squirt blood, he and other players laughed it off as a harmless bug that caused some temporary sickness.
The plague, which hit the virtual world in late September, quickly propagated, causing the temporary death of innumerable players and significant damage to large numbers of others. But it didn't have any lasting effect: those hit by the disease were either healed or quickly resurrected.
But to some scientists and educators, virtual reality outbreaks like the one that slammed WoW could prove a valuable tool for studying the spread of infectious diseases — as well as public response to them. The correlation between online and real-world behaviour in the face of epidemics, they say, takes on heightened significance in the face of public-health threats like a potential avian flu pandemic.
"Similar to a natural virus, [which] in its DNA has the information encoded about what it's going to do, in a virtual world, when you have an outbreak, you have a piece of code with instructions about what it's going to do," said Yasmin Kafai, an associate professor of learning and instruction at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.
Kafai and her colleague, Nina Neulight, recently conducted an investigation into "students' understanding of a virtual infectious disease in relation to their understanding of natural infectious diseases". To do so, they intentionally spread a disease called Whypox through the online children's game "Whyville."
To Kafai, virtual online worlds — where players' economic and social behaviour is often a microcosm of their off-line behaviour — are a perfect place to compare real-world infectious diseases with those comprised only of digital ones and zeros. Among other things, she explained, virtual environments can allow...
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