The World's Largest Social Laboratory: How Videogames are Saving your Life

Those of you who choose to squander their days in a banal and wizard-free existence may not be familiar with MMPORGs - Massively Multi-Player Online Roleplaying Games. MMPORG players inhabit a game world and, through a fictional character, negotiate a complex, ever-changing, and challenge-filled terrain. This world is not their own, but is shared by other human-controlled avatars, who constantly interact with one another. In case you presumed that these were relatively small affairs, the World of Warcraft "universe" boats a population of 11.5 million players.

Back to real life. MMPORGs are a ridiculously potent tool for social scientists. In September 2005, World of Warcraft engineers introduced an enemy character with the power to pass a "Corrupted Blood" spell. Anyone in the enemy's area could contract this debilitating spell and spread it, contagiously, to others. The disease was meant to remain restricted to one region of the game, but a coding error let it spread across the Warcraft universe.

Chaos ensued.

The millions of human players reacted as they would to a real life epidemic. Quarantines were set up, old haunts were abandoned, long-time allies chose between loyalty and self-interest, infected characters were sent to mingle with enemy clans, etc. In fact, the gamers' collective reactions are an amazing study of how human populations adapt to epidemics. The only difference between this "study" and actual human experiments is that, in a digital world, every single step of every individual's activity is tracked and recorded online. We know, step by step, how millions of individuals separately and collectively faced a rampant disease.

Wow.

See here for some economic applications. Wave of the future, bro.