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[mikepollson]

Researchers ranging from psychologists to epidemiologists have wondered for some time whether online, multiplayer games might provide some ways to test concepts that are otherwise difficult to track in the real world. A Saturday morning session at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science described what might be the most likely way of finding out. With the cooperation of Sony, a collaborative group of academic researchers at a number of institutions have obtained the complete server logs from the company's Everquest 2 MMORPG.

As the researchers who are dealing with this new resource describe it, it's one of those "be careful what you wish for" situations—with nearly 60TB of data, the standard procedures for tackling social data sets just aren't up to the job.

[Clockwork Jello]

I'm sure everyone has heard of the game World of Warcraft. Well it was some time ago a raid dungeon called Zul'Gurub was introduced into the game. It was in this dungeon that one of the enemies had an attack that would give the target a disease. A player of the Hunter class had his pet get his with this disease. The programming for the game was supposed to clear all players and pets of this disease when they left the dungeon. Somehow the code didnt work correctly and the pet did not get cured. This disease was extremely contagious, airborne and fatal. The player took his pet to the capitol city where large numbers of players gather. The disease spread quickly. As soon as players started figuring out what happened, they began to take what they saw as appropriate measures. They broke off into groups. They went into hiding into the wilderness of the game to escape the infected. Groups would kill anyone they didn't recognise to prevent themselves from getting the disease. It became like a huge sociology experiment in an epidemic scenario. One couldn't really test something like this out in real life, but in a social virtual envrionment no one rally got hurt. However the level of attachment people have to their virtual characters caused them to act just as if it was them being put in danger.

Yes, I do believe the possibility for testing concepts within the environment of a MMORPG is definitely viable.