attn: sam

[FalseTodd]

oh man i can't even tell you how much that rings true as far as the game mirroring real life:

-haves vs. have nots: i am now part of a guild that plays alot and does some of the more difficult stuff - and as a result we have some of the best stuff that you can get (well, we're starting too) and the people that just HATE you for that is pretty remarkable. they're not roleplaying it either, it's real annoyance

-racism - when you first start the game you choose one of two sides - you cannot communicate with a player on the "other side" in any way, and there is only a seldom-used and anonymous mechanism for trading with them, so the other side is really "the Other" so to speak. i never fail to be amazed at the intense vitriol players develop towards players on the other side: ascribing all sorts of negative attributes....and again it's not in some "spirit of the game" roleplaying thing, at least IMO it's not.

 

[FalseTodd]

and that's all on top of people's tendency to fly off the handle or be dicks when handed anonymity, which of course is common to the internet and not all that remarkable

 

[Sandfire]

now that we know warcraft makes a good anthropological study, what about its applications to epidemiology?:

http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/gadgets/index.blog?entry_id=1230071

seriously, this has actually raised some eyebrows, there is talk of modelling the spread of infectious diseases in a virtual world and whatnot.

 

[NAD]

hey, morrowind did something like that 3 years ago with the corprus disease. not quite as extensive though.

oh shit i just outted myself. well at least i no longer write for an indie webzine!

 

[FalseTodd]

Hehe, that was a riot. The thing is, I think the article author is wrong - as far as I know the plague did not make it back to a major city accidentally, and required a fair amount of planning and execution on the part of a few players. The best part about it was that they infected town guards, who are very hard to kill, and thus far too hardy to be killed by the disease at all, so they acted as a major vector for the plague, wandering around town infecting players.

 

[xfer]

i agree that's nothing new, though. back in 1995 the exact same thing happened on the MUD i used to play. you could cast "cure disease" to cure plagues, though, so often the MUD would be waiting for a high-level priest to log in and then beg him to spend an hour travelling around curing diseases in the infected mobs.

and yeah, sometimes we did it on purpose. you'd place a plagued mob at recall (the point everyone in the city enters) and, because it was a safe zone, the mob couldn't be killed. players would appear, get plagued, and have to go to the "temple" to pay the game for a heal...where we would be lying in wait, leap out, and PK them.

 

[mindspell]