Introduction
What is the most popular topic these years? I would say it’s COVID-19. COVID-19 is the largest pandemic in recent years, it has worldwide effects on the economy, health and many other fields in the most countries in this globe. We also had a pandemic event(Corrupted Blood) in the online game World of Warcraft many years before. Recently, some researchers studied the similarity between these two events and try to use models to expect COVID-19.
Analysis
On September 2005, World of Warcraft set a new jungle-like area of the game world, Zul’Gurub. The boss in this area is called Hakkar, a powerful foe with the ability to infect player’s characters with a disease called Corrupted Blood, which would then be passed on to other nearby characters. World of Warcraft gives players the ability to fast travel – they can move instantly from remote areas like Zul’Gurub back to the main cities. This means those players have the ability to bring the disease to the high-density area and mass population centers. The result of this ability is the virus was spread from a rural area(graph 1) to the most places(graph 2) in the game in a short time.
The virus can be spread by players’ pets and some non-player characters in different ways(Graph 3).
Eric Lofgren is an epidemiologist as well as a game player. He realized the player’s reactions to the Corrupted Blood give a valuable insight and can be used to study their behaviour of them during the rapid spread of a real-world contagious disease. This is valuable because scientists use models to predict how a disease like Covid-19 will spread are built on assumptions about people’s behaviours. We can see a similarity between these two events. Some players tried to go to the epicentre to heal those influenced players, but this also means these healthy players will contract the virus and spread it. The same thing happens to the healthcare workers, they become sick and spread COIVD-19 to other people when they back to home.
But humans are irrational, people will be against the government’s rule if it restricts their freedom, even though it’s an efficient way to restrict the spreading of virus. For those powerful players, they were not affected a lot by the Corrupted Blood so they continued to travel through the whole map but this led to the death of the weak players in the areas where they travelled through. The same thing happened in the real world. This brings the chaos to the economy of the main cities both in the game and real world. Make it hard for people to live.
In the end, World of Warcraft reset all their servers to end the pandemic but in the real world, COVID-19 still exists.
Conclusion
It’s obvious that we don’t have an efficient way to restrict or terminate the pandemic in a short time both in the game and real life. I think this is because our society is a very large and complicated strongly connected component. It’s difficult to separate a large graph into many little SCCs by cutting few edges. My idea to solve this problem is at the beginning of the pandemic, we can use the Girvan-Newman algorithm to calculate the highest betweenness, separate the small graph(because it’s at the beginning) into many isolated SCCs and control as best as we can.
Resource
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/04/09/world-warcraft-experienced-pandemic-2005-that-experience-may-help-coronavirus-researchers/
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/world-of-warcraft-coronavirus-corrupted-blood
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(07)70212-8/fulltext