The Adventures of Chester: Open Post

Comment here. Link here. Got something on your mind?

Let's discuss.

I'll start. Here's something a little off the beaten path: [h-t: ZenPundit]: Virtual plague spreading like wildfire in World of Warcraft:

Players of Blizzard's incredibly popular World of Warcraft are reporting the outbreak of a virtual plague that is spreading across major cities in the virtual land of Azeroth, infecting player characters at an alarming rate.

The trouble started when Blizzard programmers added a new instance, which is a separate area connected to the outside world that players can enter and attempt unique quests. One of these instances, Zul'Grub, contained the god of blood, Hakkar. Hakkar was a powerful foe that could cast spells of his own, including a spell called Corrupted Blood. This spell did a large amount of damage to any player within the vicinity of the casting, and the effects lingered on after the spell was over.

What happened next was something Blizzard did not expect. Some of the players who had gone into the instance emerged back into the main world of Azeroth, and started spreading the Corrupted Blood disease to others who they came into close contact with. The infection soon spread into many of the cities and towns in the virtual world. Since the disease was intended to be a danger to powerful players, it tended to kill those less than level 50 almost instantly.

Game masters (GMs) tried to quarantine certain players from moving into new areas, but they kept escaping the quarantine and moving on to infect other people. A patch was issued to try and mitigate the damage, but it did not have the desired effect. According to a Blizzard poster on the WoW forums:

It appears that the hotfix remedy concocted to combat the recent Azerothian outbreak has not yielded desired results. At this time, our medical staff is continuing to develop an effective cure. We look forward to ensuring the health and vitality of the citizens of Azeroth in the near future.

The most interesting thing about this "outbreak" is perhaps the reaction it has provoked among WoW players. Instead of being angry about the deleterious effects of a bug, many are treating this as an exciting and unprecedented event in the WoW universe. It would be even more interesting if epidemiologists in the real world found that this event was worthy of studying as a kind of controlled experiment in disease propagation.

When I first see things like this I'm immediately reminded of how many little subcultures there are out there that I know absolutely nothing about. I had the same feeling reading Speed Tribes : Days and Night's with Japan's Next Generation, though that was several years ago.

Well there I go, hijacking the open thread already. Bad Chester!

Link away and post away!

UPDATE: Until I figure out how to get trackbacks to display inside the post body, you'll have to click on the "trackback" link for this post to see them. If anyone knows how to do this, I'd love a quick email about it. Thanks!

UPDATE 2: Anatomy of an anti-war puff piece attempts to dissect an AP article covering today's protests in DC.

One thought about all this: the decreasing costs of satellite imagery in real-time could make such fiskings pretty easy in the near future: one could simply click over to Google Earth, download imagery from DC during the protests and then examine it closely to estimate the crowd sizes. If I had this capability, I'd post screen captures from the imagery here and then we could all see with our own eyes how many protestors are there.

Posted by Chester on September 23, 2005 11:45 PM to The Adventures of Chester