Cn Haz virtual model for the path of a pandemic?
This entry was created by a student in Stanford's Rhetoric of Gaming class. For more about the class and the assignment, click here.
The college life is one of constant toil; a paper here, a p-set there, it never ends. However, once in awhile we naive frosh are given the onerous joy of a research project. This here post is my attempt to make sense of the ramblings of my mind. To that end, I'm gonna talk about what I want to talk about, and if you want to make fun of it well......you can.
In the course of a single night, after much deliberation and procrastination, I arrived at, what I believe to be an interesting topic for conversation, which could evolve into a research project. That project would be focused on the problems and questions being addressed through the use of videogames that model reality; however, that topic is a much winnowed version of the overall idea, that videogames are leaving the basement for the light of the research world. I have found several examples of genuine research involving videogames. The reasearch topics vary from the development/ regeneration of neural pathways by playing tetris, to the use of World of Warcraft as a grand simulation of the effects of a pandemic. The latter example is the one that sparked my interest in the first place, and thus will be the subject of this post.
That example, when the CDC tried to use Blizzard's MMORPG "World of Warcraft" as a virus sim, grew out of a simple glitch. The plague, which began on September 13, 2005, evolved into a pandemic when players discovered how to spread a Boss's spell (corrupted blood) outside of his dungeon. During the panic, some players acted as healers, volunteering to help, select others would maliciously spread the disease, akin to real disease spreaders, early AIDS patient Gaëtan Dugas and Typhoid patient Mary Mallon. Blizzard attempted to fix the problem with voluntary quarantines, but most did not take it seriously, forcing Blizzard to do a hard reset of all of its servers for the game.
The little incident caught international attention, and led to a pronounced scholarly interest in the game. The CDC even tried to get in, requesting the stats on the outbreak as a model of potential terrorism, but where told it was a simple glitch.
However, one dedicated professor, Ran D Balicer, an epidemiologist physician at the Ben-Gurion University in Israel, published an article in the Journal Epidemiology describing the similarities between this outbreak and the recent SARS and avian influenza outbreaks. Dr. Balicer's article is a wonderful source for information on the use of videogames as models. He writes,
"As mathematical modeling of infectious diseases becomes increasingly important for developing public health policies, a novel platform for such studies might be considered. Millions of people worldwide play interactive online role-playing games, forming complex and rich networks among their virtual characters. An unexpected outbreak of an infective communicable disease (unplanned by the game creators) recently occurred in this virtual world. This outbreak holds surprising similarities to real-world epidemics. It is possible that these virtual environments could serve as a platform for studying the dissemination of infectious diseases, and as a testing ground for novel interventions to control emerging communicable diseases."
Dr. Balicer advocates the use of videogames as simulators for the spread of disease, and to that end he is wonderfully quotable; indeed, his ideas in said article will form a significant portion of the paper. However, his ideas fomented talks on the subject, leading to the inclusion of Second Life as another modeling platform, as well as plans to use VG's as a platform for research into terrorism. Additionally, his perspective planted the seed of curiosity in Nina Fefferman, a Tufts University assistant research professor of public health and family medicine. She has since authored several papers on the subject, and in May 2008, she spoke at the Games for Health conference in Baltimore, Maryland. Professor Fefferman spoke about how massively multiplayer online populations could solve the problems inherent with more traditional models of epidemics.
I could wax on about the implications of these games specifically in the epidemiological fields, but my paper is to focus on the broader implications of VG's. I'll be researching a bevy of applications, each with questions to answer, and problems to solve. The Health interest is but one aspect my interest here.
Unfortunately, I could not access the full article, due in part to some issues with capitalistic websites with little regard for a poor college student's needs. However, once I overcome that little issue, life will be grand.
Comments
While you don't explicitly state this, it seems your focus could easily be just on the modeling of disease in games. There is probably enough literature on the outbreak of "corrupted blood" to spawn an entire research project. Maybe you could run accounts of the ingame outbreak parallel to those of the emergence of HIV. That would either be really compelling, really irreverent, or both.
Posted by: Franklin | October 13, 2009 11:56 PM
I find this topic rather facinating. Perhaps you could look into current pandemic simulation models and compare that to corrupted blood and assess its effectiveness as a model. Perhaps you could also explore how disease control measures could also be tested out using games as a model?
Posted by: Kee Wui Huang | October 14, 2009 12:33 AM
The idea of exploring the modeling of real life scenarios in virtual worlds is a fascinating one -- though BROAD -- and I'm glad that you've focused in, at least here, on the pandemic model. As you divide into your research, you can decide if this will be the primary focus for you paper or if, perhaps, you'll feature three different types of examples to show the way in which this modeling can work. If you do the later, you'll need to develop a mode of categorizing the different types of modeling to distinguish them from one another.
This site (http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473309907702128/abstract) references another article, this one from the Lancet, that might be of interest to you. You should ask Chris our librarian for help getting your hands on it if you can't readily find it linked through our databases.
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