Okay, so any World of Warcraft player knows how annoying the scourge disease was during the in-game Halloween celebrations. Sure, it was fun for the first ten minutes to go around infecting others, making a massive zombie army to attack one of the capital cities. However, after an hour of constantly being infected and dying, I was unable to accomplish anything and ended taking a break from the game until the Halloween celebrations ended. However, experts are saying that this annoying yet harmless addition to WoW can be used to study terrorism.

Due to the nature of how the disease spread, expert Charles Blair believes that the game could information on how terrorists form tactics and plans (http://www.cetisresearch.org/people/blair.html). In order to effectively spread the disease, a player must go to a town or city and infect other players. This can be done by simply attacking each other, using an ability which throws so liquid that infects people in a small radius, or by doing a channeling ability which sacrifices the player at the expense of infecting a large area around them. Similar to actual terrorist tactics in the real world, studying players' reactions to such events is being used to gather data for what would happen in the real world. Some players try to stop the infection from spreading. Some want to join the leagues of the undead. Others run away, or stop playing all together. However, due to the fact that dying really isn't a big deal in World of Warcraft (simply speaking with a spirit healer or running to their corpse revives a player), the study is being taken with a grain of salt.

This isn't the first time that WOW has been used as a simulation of real world situations. The Cursed Blood plague the infected Azeroth a few years ago was used to study epidemics and people's reactions. This proves that games can be used as more than just a form of entertainment, and are providing a solid purpose and usefulness. In the mean time, I'm just frustrated with the game time I lost thanks to the scourge....