How World of Warcraft Might Help Head off the Next Pandemic
On September 13th 2005, Nick Yee died. A few moments later, he came back to life. Then he died again.
And he wasn’t the only one. His city was littered with bodies, bones scattered across the floor of the auction house and town square. “It was simply hilarious,” he said, “that everyone was dying and no one was sure what was happening.”
It was hilarious because the Nick Yee that died wasn’t really Nick Yee. It was his avatar, a Night Elf in World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game played by over 11 million people around the world. Yee’s Night Elf died of a sickness called Corrupted Blood, which had quickly spread from a single dungeon to four servers, infecting millions of players and bringing the game to a crashing halt.
In another part of the world, a Tauren Druid logged on and started walking toward the main city. He had heard that something was going on, some kind of outbreak, and he wanted to see it for himself. In front of him lay the same kinds of skeletons Yee had seen, piles of blue bones littered across the landscape. Nearby, infected characters were emitting bursts of bright red blood, accompanied each time by a splurting sound, every few seconds. The player controlling the Tauren Druid, Eric Lofgren, picked up the phone and called Nina Fefferman. “You should log in,” he said. “That thing we were talking about is actually happening.”
Fefferman looked around for a few minutes at the confusion. She then quickly logged off, picked up the phone, and called Blizzard Entertainment, developers
