Late 2019 is when Coronavirus officially started spreading in its former epicenter, Wuhan, China. However, it looks like an earlier prediction of the virus was caught in one of the famous action video game, World of Warcraft in 2005. The details of the virus on the game are very similar to today's COVID-19. Does WoW predict the virus before it even started spreading? And how did developers end the virus?
Did World of Warcraft predict how Coronavirus spread in 2005?
If you remember playing World of Warcraft back in 2005, you would know what exact virus we're talking about. For those unfamiliar, here's the story.
Blizzard Entertainment, the game's developer, already faced the same Coronavirus-like issue more than a decade ago. According to a report in the Washington Post, on Sept. 13, 2005, World of Warcraft experienced a virtual pandemic called by many as 'Corrupted Blood.'
This virus infected thousands of players back then. Interestingly, it left numbers of lower-leveled players safe from the pandemic. Most players even give heads up to other players of WoW to prevent getting in the same area wherein they were infected.
When does the 'corrupted blood incident' started?
To those still unfamiliar with the corrupted blood incident, this unusual event started when developers introduced the villain Hakkar the Soulflayer.
In the game, once you attack Hakkar, he will soon cast the corrupted blood virus-like on the players and will damage them for at least 10 seconds. Once a player gets infected with the corrupted blood, he will also infect other players with the same damaging effect.
Originally, the virus would have to be gone after the 10 seconds timeframe. However, this didn't happen.
The corrupted blood continued to infect thousands of players and did not disappear after the said period. This was when the players of WoW got distracted.
"The world chat would explode any time a city fell," said Nadia Heller, an ex-World of Warcraft player whose character lived through the incident. "We kept a close eye not only on our guild chat but on world chat as well to see where not to go. We didn't want to catch it."
For experts, WoW just taught them how Coronavirus easily spread
Dr. Nina Fefferman, an epidemiologist and was a World of Warcraft player at the time of the incident, said that the corrupted blood incident in the game gave her insights on how Coronavirus usually spreads from person to person.
"Many victims of Corrupted Blood thus reached heavily populated areas before either being killed by or cured of the disease, mimicking the travel of contagious carriers over long distances that have been the hallmark of many disease outbreaks in history," said on her published a study in The Lancet.
On the other hand, Dr. Dmitri Williams, an associate professor from USC who was also playing World of Warcraft during the Corrupted Blood incident, debunked this belief of Fefferman.
"There are games where you are encouraged to behave in a way that you would never behave offline," Williams said. "You really have to know [the game], play it, and understand the culture so you can make these kinds of determinations that, yeah, this is a pretty good proxy."
Maybe we can get something else from playing WoW, right?
