heavydog

Apparently, there’s a disease in World of Warcraft, which, if you are under a level 50, will kill you. Or something. It has something to do with pets - pets with diseases are infecing WoW characters.

It’s obviously a pandemic you know.

This is lifted from a forum moderator on the WoW site:

“It appears that the hotfix remedy concocted to combat the recent Azethorian outbreak has not yielded the desired results

“At this time, our medical staff is continuing to develop an effective cure. We look forward to ensuring the health and vitality of the citizens of Azeroth in the near future.”

Now, this freaks me out for 2 reasons. The first is that this is a game and it has a virus which, although was initially introduced by the games creators, has spun out of control and is now killing all the characters who can’t defend themselves from it. It’s a virus thats not a virus. There was a “hotfix” released, which didn’t seem to do that much - rather like cures for the common cold then. Has the game become sentient for fucks sake? Will it spread into the real world and start killing humans like some nightmarishly bad 80s budget film?

The other thing is: is it important? Theres a whole other universe going on inside our own universe, people buying a selling stuff, living daily lives, fighting dragons and shagging wenches. But, if you die, of this “disease” or for any other reason, you can still come back.

But in the real world, there are people dying every day who don’t come back. This year, there has been tradgedy, both natural and not on an enormous scale and it is still going on today, right now as you read this (If anyone does). So, does WoW really matter?

One other thing that occurs to me: could you use games like WoW to test how virii would spread in the wild? Do people in games follow the same habits and paths that they would follow, roughly, in real life (if they actually had a real life).