Virtual world participation in massively multiuser strategy games like Warcraft and 3-D immersive communities like Second Life have reached critical mass - both over 9 million members each - and can potentially be used to model real world crises. The Economist points out how Warcraft fabricated a viral epidemic and epidemiologists monitored the reactions of the participants (excerpt for those without Economist subscriptions):

A couple of years ago [Warcraft's] owners, a Californian firm called Blizzard Entertainment, accidentally spiced things up by releasing a plague far more virulent than they had intended. It started in a sparsely inhabited area but soon found its way to the cities, where it wreaked havoc.

So far, so cod-medieval. However the plague, and the reactions of the game's players to it, recently came to the attention of Eric Lofgren and Nina Fefferman, two epidemiologists at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Writing in this week's Lancet Infectious Diseases, they propose that games such as “World of Warcraft” might be used to work out how people will react when faced with situations no researcher can ethically introduce into the real world.

One surprise was that players put themselves into risky situations more often than epidemiologists allow for in their models. An unexpectedly large fraction of players acted altruistically to protect their weaker friends. On the other hand, a significant number seemed intent on infecting as many other characters as possible—behaviour reminiscent of a small minority of people with AIDS. There was also a lot of dangerous curiosity, as players who were offline when the plague began started logging on only in order to find out what was happening, and thus risked the deaths of their characters.

The question often comes up, just who is the Alan Greenspan of Second Life? Who pulls the levers and otherwise steers the fate of the Second Life economy? Incorporating a dynamic mixture of Linden Dollars (L$), land sales, commercial transactions and intellectual property, the economy is in fact managed by a number of people at Linden Lab. Despite being one of the central features of the virtual world, I still think there is a general haziness around conceptually what these tools represent. Further read >>>