Gaming and COVID-19

During this time of quarantine, many industry suffered but some of them flourished as people staying indoor mostly did one or too things. Gaming and social media. Of coarse there are others that are doing other things, but with many people indoors having turned to game to supple them with adequate entertainment, the gaming industry grew. The games it self now these days are pretty similar to each other in my opinion and some of the mechanics are just modified forms of another. But there had been a rather interesting incident that happened in the past regarding a specific game’s debuff effect.

During the World of Warcraft’s corrupted blood bug incident, the in game plague was supposed spread rapidly from player to player but in a contained area, as it is programmed by Blizzard, but the plague found its way outside of the designated area and started to spread to players everywhere. High level players weren’t effected by the health draining debuff much, but many of the lower to mid level players were effected to the point of death. The plague spread by standing next to a player that was infected and due to this mechanic the plague rapidly spread in densely populated towns were many players were interacting and eventually even infected the npcs that started to transmit the debuff but without any symptoms. The situation was later solved by Blizzard but attracted many interests from various medical groups like CDC.

This in game incident shows the chilling similarities between the actual real life pandemics and the in game ones that was created by a bug of some sorts. Many medical officials saw this as a tool to aid them in gathering data for how the real life viruses spread, much like a lab rat test but with real people playing a game, but not much support was put into making the in game stimulation of the real life an opportunity for data collection and the results were not made. As we are currently living in a world where quarantine is a thing as well as the threat of the pandemic, I believe that people should look to different methods, especially during this times of quarantine, that can help them gather data but with people staying indoors. Think of the tools that the medical officials would have had during this epidemic when they have thought about the possibility of using gaming as a data gathering method as well as figuring out how a person would behave during a crises like a pandemic, afterall the people’s actions spread the virus not the virus itself.