Game Theory: How WoW Almost Prevented the Coronavirus Crisis! (World of Warcraft)

I have to say in the last month video games have been really stepping it up with those at-home activities to replace all the time we gamers can't be spending outside stuff like FM at home and Halo double xp during the outbreak are providing real alternatives for all those Spring Break activities that must game errs are unfortunately missing out on this year companies like Ubisoft giving away free games it's really awesome it's acting as a consolation for me not being able to see my IRL friends not being able to spend time and those big in-person groups in public places not going to restaurants and instead having to order in all the time and have meals delivered to my door oh thank you video game companies for giving me all these tools to help me through such a difficult difficult time in my social life yeah we're not fooling anyone you guys the rest of the world is eventually gonna figure out that we've been living like this for years just don't let on yet maybe we can get a couple more free games out of it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello Internet welcome to game theory the show that's helping you to escape from the cruel reality of a global pandemic by talking about an alternate reality that also had a global pandemic matpat is helpful before today's episode though a brief PSA to remind you that staying at home is the single best way to protect yourself and the people around you from coronavirus as of writing this episode more than 2 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with kovat 19 which is twice as contagious as the flu and a hundred times more deadly unlike pandemics our grandparents may have seen like measles it's almost impossible to tell if you have kovat because there are no marks there are no little red bumps and many people have zero symptoms not just for days but for weeks you literally have no idea if you have it and even less idea whether you can pass it on to someone else I mean we all feel bad about the fact that we can't go outside that there's no e3 this year that we can't even walk down a street without giving that kovat are you infected stare a lot of us are out of a job a lot of us are out of insurance heck even youtubers at this point are seeing their ad rates plummeting no joke I'm really just making content to keep the channel functioning because I like you guys and because I want to have an excuse to continue paying our employees this episode will honestly cost more to make than it will earn back in ad revenue so if we all just want to get back to work get back to our friends or just get back to them all we need to wipe this out now by staying at home and supporting the people who are at risk and when you do go out make sure you wear a mask I recently had a call with Andy Slavitt the former head of Medicare and Medicaid during the Obama administration and he said that if 80% of people wore masks out in public it would kill this thing in a matter of weeks he also said that by staying at home you are saving 41 lives it's a matter of going out unintentionally spreading it and then those people going on and infecting others and then a 1% fatality rate so anyway it is not every day that you can save an entire football team's worth of people by staying at home or wearing a facial mask so just do it guys all right dark and stormy PSA over it's also important to remember that it's okay to laugh it's even okay to make fun of ourselves and this craziness for a bit and that's why today we're seeing how the video game world dealt with its own pandemic not to make light of anything happening in the world right now but to talk about a pretty fascinating moment in gaming history and honestly an opportunity that humanity missed that would have allowed us to be more prepared for this exact type of situation because here's the thing World of Warcraft could have helped prevent kovat 19 seriously it's not a joke it's barely even an exaggeration it almost did prevent this massive pandemic but humanity just dropped the ball on it so strap in for a fascinating story pay attention for the message so we don't make the same mistake again and if nothing else maybe this episode will inspire you to play something other than Animal Crossing for an hour you're developing some uncomfortably close relationships with Tom Nook they're my friends don't think I don't see you besides trying to avoid the staggering lag notorious in major cities like iron forage vanilla World of Warcraft players wouldn't think that they would need to worry about social distancing but believe it or not back in 2005 there was absolutely a real pandemic in the world of warcraft one that looks scarily familiar to the situation that we currently find ourselves in today this is the story of World of Warcraft's corrupted blood plague back in September of 2005 less than a year after the game first launched wow added the zoo guru braid 20-person team mission recommended for players around level 60 ending with a battle against a big boss named hakkar the soulflayer who besides having a game of Thrones level awesome name could inflict players with a debuff the health effect called corrupted blood now corrupted blood did a few things it inflicted around 250 to 300 points of damage to your player every few seconds sounds pretty bad right but remember this was a raid recommended for players around level 60 the level cap at the time so your typical health pool was sitting around 4,000 to 5,000 HP it would suck sure and you would have to maintain regular healing but it wasn't gonna kill you unless you were irresponsible the debuff would eventually go away if you waited long enough but the catch was that while you were standing around waiting for it to wear off it was contagious standing next to an infected player could cause your character to become infected as well now at this point you're either thinking why the heck would game devs make anything in game contagious or oh what a cool mechanic the results of corrupted blood though are somewhere in the middle the virus this debuff was only intended to exist within the confines of the zg raid so it would create a problem for the players in the middle of the fight as they figured out ways to manage their draining health and then also transmitting it to their teammates while still dealing damage to the boss but it would disappear once players exited the dungeon all should have been functioning normally right except the development team made one major oversight players weren't the only thing exiting the dungeon animals were leaving the area too and the program didn't wipe it from them when they left for those who don't know and while the hunter class is allowed to use a tamed pet in combat pets or contracting corrupted blood during the battle just like the players except unlike the players the pet would still be infected when summoned again outside of the raid and so what happens then well the pets owner immediately gets infected except now that player is out of the dungeon and out in public just like Ovid 19 is thought to have originated in bats corrupted blood can also be classified as a zoonotic virus a virus that originates in animals and then gets passed to humans out in public anyone close to those infected players would themselves contract corrupted blood anyone the player is playing with standing next to fighting literally anything corrupted blood was carried by the likes of a couple of hunters cats or dinosaurs acropolis moving from Player to Player until finally it even infected the game's NPCs now it's important to note that the raid doling out this virus was accessible to both Alliance and horn players and it sat in one of the biggest neutral zones on the map this meant that every player in every faction was at risk for infection the NPC's ensure that the virus was carried across enemy lines acting as asymptomatic carriers having the debuff but not showing any outward signs of their infection and obviously not complaining about it because they weren't real players standing in prominent places ready to interact with players they were invisible vectors spreading and re spreading the virus across at least three servers and up to two million players but what's the big deal right I mentioned earlier that this thing wasn't that big of a risk it takes down health quickly but not so quickly that it's an immediate death sentence except those were high level players in the raid that were intended to get infected sure for a player at level 60 the max level cap for that time the game's history it was annoying for a player at lower levels though levels 1020 heck sometimes even at level 40 it becomes immediately deadly players might find themselves dead due to damage over time before they even realize what's happening in another crazy parallel to the situation that we currently find ourselves in the corrupted blood effect didn't impact all people equally like the exact scenario we're now healthy people with no issues might have no symptoms or just experience a day of feeling a little under the weather individuals with health compromises though like the elderly the very young you know people not currently at their max level so to speak they're suddenly struck out of nowhere through no fault of their own with something that could very easily be fatal as for high level players coming into contact with low-level players this happened in WoW in the exact same places it happens in the real world major cities places where all players were constantly visiting shops doing business socializing suddenly they were hotbeds for the corrupted blood virus it spread so quickly that it became almost impossible to avoid driving players out of major cities in the game just like the wealthy New Yorkers who packed their bags and headed out for the Hamptons to avoid the current pandemic the corrupted blood plague spread quickest in densely populated areas just like the current virus hit major cities in China for jumping to other hotly touristed areas in Italy the US UK and so on players who died in the games major cities might not even be able to avoid getting it again when they respond they might not be able to get out and leave before their health pool depleted again meanwhile slightly higher level players might have made it out of the cities but then they only infected players in smaller towns in one really touching parallel to our current situation some while players acted as altruistic healers trying to heal other players long enough for them to save off the effects of the plague but then these would-be doctors placed themselves in danger becoming infected often catching the corrupted blood for themselves again this strikes surprisingly close to home where people who work in the medical profession and come into direct contact with infected people are themselves one of the group's at greatest risk of infection for days the streets of World of Warcraft's biggest cities were strewn with skeletons the remains of characters who had been wiped out by this plague the disruption to gameplay was so serious that it caused Wow to gain attention outside of the game with Reuters reporting on the situation in the game like this quote dealing with thousands of complaints from players whose online alter egos have fallen victim - the plague blizzard entertainment tried to quarantine the infected zones but as is likely in real life the barriers were porous and some infected victims managed to find their way into safe areas in a matter of days millions of player deaths were attributed to the corrupted blood spread from just a few of the high-level players able to access that end game raid Blizzard eventually stepped in to fix the game and prevent the corrupted blood debuff from spreading outside the raid area seemingly the only part of our story that differs from real-life because unfortunately fixing problems in the real world isn't as simple as just releasing a new patch or resetting a server and thus ends the story of the corrupted blood play but what's possibly even more fascinating than the event itself is the aftermath of the event in the real world according to World of Warcraft producer Shane de beery what we got calls from the CDC the Center for Disease Control saying hey what's all this about the disease in your game we want to look at the simulation data it might help us in a real-world situation we kept saying no no it's just a bug we fixed it it's just a game the corrupted blood incident may have been the result of a bug but it continued to attract the attention of real-world researchers in March 2007 Randy Bala sir an epidemiologist physician at the ben-gurion University in Israel published an article in the journal Epidemiology that described the similarities between this game outbreak and the recent SARS and avian influenza outbreaks according to him role-playing games could serve as an advanced platform for modeling the dissemination of infectious diseases in a follow-up article in the very highly regarded science journal the games Second Life was also suggested as another possible platform for these sorts of studies and that's as far as it went in August of 2007 Nina pfefferman a Tufts University assistant research professor of Public Health and Family Medicine also noted the corrupted Bloods resemblance with biological plays well she acknowledged that video game behavior in a virtual environment won't necessarily mirror real-world behavior she compared the World of Warcraft incident to a drug trial with mice saying this it was a real good first step these are my mice and I want this to be my new experiment set up and maybe the only time that gamers would be happy to be compared with lab mice I'm all-in just call me Mouse Pat what's interesting about Nina Fefferman s call for research is that she pointed out an important observation a virus almost doesn't matter as much as the way the people treat it what matters is the behavior of players specifically how they evaluate risk how rumors spread about a virus and how Public Health notices would be handled and how people react to them in fact listening to what Nina Fefferman had to say about corrupted blood and its applications to real-world pandemics is almost prophetic in light of recent events when it actually happens a lot of people have the emotional responsive you know what I'm gonna guess it's gonna be okay I'm gonna try and stick it out people tell themselves that everything's gonna be okay without needing to go into lockdown even as the facts of the situation and everything we know about how viral infection spreads tells us that now is the time to minimize contact with other people it turns out the behavior of many World of Warcraft players during the corrupted blood plague wasn't what some people would have called rational well he had people trying to help staying out of the city's curing people he also had looky-loos people who flocked to the major cities because they just had to see it for themselves remember this was way back in 2005 in the olden days before twitch and YouTube live streaming the only way to believe it was to go there and see it for yourself and now whoops you're infected too then you had yourself the griefers the people who would intentionally spread the plague and try to use it to kill low-level players obviously how people behave in a video game isn't gonna be representative of how they behave in real life right I mean nobody would go into public intentionally coughing on people's food to try and make them sick right humanity's the worst sometimes the upshot of all of this is that even though we think people behave more recklessly in a video game than in real life our assumptions might not be as far off as we think and games might have more to contribute to epidemiological models than we realize luckily we might not be the only ones starting to realize this either last month an article came out that prominent infectious disease epidemiologist and World of Warcraft player dr. Eric Lofgren is revisiting the parallels between vanilla Wiles corrupted blood and our current global outbreak he works at the University of Washington in one of the hardest hit states in the US for this epidemic and he's spoken out about how his time playing Wow has influenced his work in epidemiology but from him for me it was a good illustration of how important it is to understand people's behaviors when people react to public health emergencies and how those reactions really shape the course of things we often view epidemics as these things that sort of happen to people there's a virus and it's doing things but really it's a virus that's spreading between people and how people interact and behave and comply with authority figures or don't those are all very important things and he's among those who've been suggesting that Blizzard should actually bring back the corrupted blood virus in order to better understand its spread and how players behave in the midst of a pandemic with attention now coming from major news outlets suggesting that Wow could be a valuable research tool you never know what might be coming down the Wow patch pipeline and the role gamers might have to play in understanding and beating the biggest viruses of our lifetime so the message today is this know that the games you're playing are bigger than you and man if corrupted blood comes back in vanilla Wow get ready to sign up for whatever free trial Blizzard is going on right now not just because it's fun to play a game but because it'll be important for science it'll be important for learning how to prevent these sorts of global health disasters in the future and kept because grinding to become a level 60 Night Elf hunter is a nice break from grinding tens of thousands of bells to pay off a raccoon landlord but hey that's just a theory a game theory thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 3,356,330

Rating: 4.8802581 out of 5

Keywords: world of warcraft, wow, world of warcraft shadowlands, shadowlands, world of warcraft shadowlands trailer, wow shadowlands, wow shadowlands trailer, 15 years of warcraft, wow corrupted blood, world of warcraft corrupted blood, corrupted blood plague, world of warcraft virus, wow virus, wow 8.3, world of warcraft blizzcon, world of warcraft classic pvp, game theorists, game theory, matpat, world of warcraft theory, wow theory

Id: XTGHSpgp5mc

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 25 2020

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[u/yiutiffany615]

Great, facemasks are useful and the virus is deadly, you got that right Matt, good for you.

Only if you didn't tell people the complete opposite in the last video that was posted a month and a half ago on this topic huh?

[u/De_Quillsta]

If MatPat could stop profiteering from a pandemic that'd be great

[u/Expresso_Depresso77]

aww I thought it was another SCP thing darn...