As you may or may not know, I used to play the online game Warcraft. A lot. Very simply, its a role playing Dungeon & Dragons sort of thing. Here’s what’s important for you to know – when you play, you are interacting with actual people all over the world. That means every other character you encounter behaves as determined by the individual player  controlling that character. So, a guy who is a jerk in Dallas can be a jerk online in the game doing things to annoy you or cause harm to your player. Contraversely, the nice guy in Des Moines might be a cool dude online giving free gear to new players and helping new players learn the ropes. In short, characters behave however the player controlling the character wants them to.

Okay, cut to the Corrupted Blood Plague. The folks running the game introduced a little challenge to the game. If you were in a specific area of the game your character could get infected with a contagious disease that would, over a short period of time, kill your character. Additionally, your character could infect other people by getting close them. This effect was supposed to be limited to this one little geographical location in the huge game world. Supposed to. Turns out, someone managed to leave that little zone and infect other people in the game, and so on, and so on.

The game was thrown into a tizzy. People who had the ability to heal other players ran around healing as many people as they could. Others ran for the hills and isolated themselves. And some, in a frenzy of nihilistic fervor, set out to infect as many other players as possible.

Eventually, the game designers managed to get it under control. You can read about the whole thing here on Wikipedia.

During the epidemic, normal gameplay was disrupted. The major towns and cities were abandoned by the population as panic set in and players rushed to evacuate to the relative safety of the countryside, leaving urban areas filled with dead player characters.^[4]

Player responses varied but resembled real-world behaviors. Some characters with healing abilities volunteered their services, some lower-level characters who could not help would direct people away from infected areas, some characters would flee to uninfected areas, and some characters attempted to spread the disease to others.^[1] Players in the game reacted to the disease as if there were real risk to their well-being.^[5] Blizzard Entertainment attempted to institute a voluntary quarantine to stem the disease, but it failed, as some players didn’t take it seriously, while others took advantage of the pandemonium.^[1] Despite certain security measures, players overcame them by giving the disease to summonable pets.^[6]

The behavior of the players, some helping to heal and some helping to spread the disease, drew the interest of epidemiologists and others who study pandemics. Succinctly, the behavior of players in the game seemed to mimic behaviors in real life.

How does this come into play for you and I? Well, apparently in situations like these there are some predictable behaviors by predictable elements:

• People flee the big cities for the countryside
• Quarantines are ignored or bypassed
• Some people actively spread the disease
• Some people actively work to halt the disease
• Some people take advantage of the situation

When the news media talks about everyone working to control the situation and to save lives, there’s something they gloss over – the people who do all the opposite. And we, you and I, need to be aware that there are people who, as Alfred Pennyworth said, just want to see the world burn.

I suppose the vast majority of people are good or neutral in these matters. They just want to help, or at least not become victims themselves. But, there’s always gonna be that group that thinks letting the bees loose in a subway car is great fun, or that shooting flaming arrows into a forest and watching the ridgelines burn is a nice way to spend the evening. I suspect there’s more than one or two people out there thinking “I hope someone who is infected goes to the theater and sneezes on everyone” and there’s probably a few out there who are doing just that…licking doorknobs, sneezing on public payphones, that sorta thing.

I wonder if the CDC plans and scenarios take those sort of agents into account………