Video Games and Real Life
Apr. 12th, 2007 03:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zanSometimes you come across the oddest things on the internet.
"There's a recent example of the unexpected: the plague. We'd implemented a new dungeon which included a spell effect called 'Corrupted Blood'. It was a spell that did damage to you, and if you came near other players, the spell effect passed onto them. The idea was that this spell existed only in this dungeon, but there was a bug and it got out. Players went back into towns and were spreading it to other players. We quickly resolved the issue, but what surprised us was that on the game's forums, players were like: "Wow,what a fantastic world event! The day the plague wiped out Ironforge!" We got calls from the CDC - the Centre 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, no, it's just a bug! We fixed it, it's just a game!" (Linked to from a CVG article and the Wikipedia entry.)
"There's a recent example of the unexpected: the plague. We'd implemented a new dungeon which included a spell effect called 'Corrupted Blood'. It was a spell that did damage to you, and if you came near other players, the spell effect passed onto them. The idea was that this spell existed only in this dungeon, but there was a bug and it got out. Players went back into towns and were spreading it to other players. We quickly resolved the issue, but what surprised us was that on the game's forums, players were like: "Wow,what a fantastic world event! The day the plague wiped out Ironforge!" We got calls from the CDC - the Centre 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, no, it's just a bug! We fixed it, it's just a game!" (Linked to from a CVG article and the Wikipedia entry.)
