Virtual world, real plague

In a strange, and somewhat unsettling development, a virtual world has been hit by a plague:

Warcraft Plague Runs Amok

In a bizarre case of art imitating life, players of the Blizzard Entertainment game World of Warcraft suddenly found themselves dying from a mysteriously rampant plague that ravaged their virtual world.

It began when a new, especially challenging dungeon (Zul'Gurub) opened, which featured a "dungeon boss, called Hakkar the Soulflayer, cast a spell called Corrupted Blood [ed: probably a reference to King Lear, Act 2, Scene 4, where Lear denounces Goneril as "a plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle / In my corrupted blood."]."

Such powerful spell attacks aren't unusual in the World of Warcraft game world. But what happened next was just plain weird.

When infected adventurers returned to town at the end of their quest, they inadvertently passed along the Corrupted Blood infection to those nearby. In short order, the plague ravaged the population. Soon entire cities fell victim to the artificial disease.

According to Jeremy Reimer on Ars Technica,

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.

Worldofwar.net editor Paul Younger was quoted by the BBC as saying that it "could possibly be considered the first proper [virtual] 'world event'."

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