Corrupted Blood

    Disease among the living is a seeming constant throughout time.  No matter where you look in history, sickness and the spreading of said, has always been a problem for human beings. Even so, it has been used as a weapon as far back as the beginnings of warfare, when corpses could be used to spread infection against a defending city.  It may seem crazy for us now, especially when we think of the amount known about medicine and  curing diseases. More like using a large fire with uncertain winds to change who’s side gets burned, but it has happened. In many ways you could say it still happens, or that the possibility could happen  in the modern world we know.

    On September 13^th , 2005, Blizzard introduced a new dungeon in World of Warcraft called Zul’Gurub. At the end of the dungeon, it’s last boss, Hakkar, would curse players with a debuff  called Corrupted Blood. Corrupted Blood was a disease like curse that would damage players over time, this one doing a significant amount of damage. The disease could be passed between any nearby characters, eventually killing off lower level characters within seconds, while higher level characters could usually keep themselves alive. Corrupted Blood would only disappear when one of two outcomes were met; the first being when enough time passed. The other, when the character died.

    The most interesting part about the disease was not necessarily it’s ability to spread nor it’s connection  to the  new dungeon, but a glitch which caused it to affect players outside the dungeon. As players who were still afflicted by Corrupted Blood  left the dungeon,  the disease continued to affect the player, including spreading to other characters rapidly.

    Although the disease was intended to be a short range, short term annoyance, malice and ignorant players alike, would take advantage of the glitch, spreading the disease. Non-player characters could contract Corrupted Blood as well, but were asymptomatic and could spread  the disease to others.  High traffic cities, such as Orgrimmar and Ironforge,  quickly became plagued by Corrupted Blood, wiping out entire cities of players. As soon as players resurrected, their previous, and now dead, bodies would revert to skeletons; filling city streets to the brim with the skeletons of players to the point that the streets would become white with their bones.

    Despite the fact the players could easily be resurrected, albeit with all the inconveniences of resurrecting, such as amour damage, player reactions resembled real-world behaviors in an epidemic.  Some characters with healing abilities would volunteer their services, some low-level character would try to direct people away from infected areas, some characters would attempt to escape to uninfected areas; still, other would attempt to spread  the disease to others. In many ways, players in the game reacted to the disease as if it were a real risk to their well-being. Blizzard Entertainment attempted to institute voluntary quarantines to stem disease, but it failed, as some players didn’t take it seriously, while others took advantage of the pandemonium. Major towns and cities were quickly abandoned by the population   as panic set in and players rushed to the relative safety of the countryside. Blizzard would make notices during the original outbreak, but kept changing its position as it could not effectively deal with the problem. Eventually leading to several patches and  a reset to fix the problem.

    While it might be easy to say what you would do under a time of stress, such during a plague or a tornado warning, your reactions can radically change during the actual disaster. And thus, in many ways, the Corrupted Blood Incident acts a very good, accidental, experiment and representation of the reactions of a populace in an epidemic in ways a computer model alone just can’t show. Corrupted Blood lasted only a week and spread to three servers before it was fixed, but the implications on how the general population, and even a governing body, might react to plague is startling.

    In many ways, the incident as a model shows us what we’ve already known through other genres. Zombie movies and even movies such as Contagion, generally do a good job at showing how a population and governing body can react during a crisis in which regulations for such events fail, and communication, or lack thereof,  and fear can lead to panic and thus further crisis. Games that simulate zombie outbreaks can sometime represent the degradation of organization meant to deal with threats, whether medical or antagonistic or natural, when dealing with unprecedented catastrophic events such as the outbreak of SARS in China or Hurricane Katrina in the Unites States.

    While response teams learn from these disasters and come up with new strategies, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine a plague as bad as Corrupted Blood in real life. Especially when all it would take is a single, modified virus. Whether made and spread through instruction found on the internet, the plot of terrorist gone too far, or a simple accident in a Biosafety level-4 Facility somewhere in the world.