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You might think that video game viruses have little to teach the world about real world sicknesses, but one RPG proved how wrong you’d be, as revealed via the Q&A session at PAX West 2024’s Death & Decay: The Science of Gaming’s Favorite Diseases panel.

“In World of Warcraft, there was a status called ‘Corrupted Blood,’ and it spread in a very plague-like way to different player characters, so people were sequestering in little corners of the map hoping that they didn’t get it,” explained VaxSync Inc. CEO Joseph Hunter, after the panel’s experts were asked if they were familiar with the Corrupted Blood story. “If I remember correctly, it would kill your character, and you could not resurrect, and they didn’t fix it for awhile, so everyone was panicking about their character not being alive anymore.”

Sounds like a bad time, right? Well, not if you’re someone who studies epidemics, as it turns out.

“It’s used nowadays by actual epidemiologists to say, ‘Okay, here’s how people reacted. How does that translate to actual action?’ Because — until recently — we didn’t really have good data on how people act in a pandemic scenario. There’s a lot of modeling. Now, we know too well how people react, and I do believe it was fairly similar.”

It turns out, that’s not the only crossover between the WoW event and real world epidemiology. As the questioner who raised the topic explained that the Corrupted Blood status was initially intended to stay inside a particular area but “developers forgot to cleanse the effect from pets that were banished it had the effect,” Hunter pointed out, “Just like ticks got on rats that got on ships that then got shipped, and then we got the Black Plague!”

Who knew World of Warcraft could be quite so historically — and predictively — accurate?

Watch the full Death & Decay: The Science of Gaming’s Favorite Diseases from PAX West 2024 below.

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