You Asked For It!

And so you get it. Because that's just the kind of people person I can be.

From a Concerned Reader in Petersburg, VA: Elections Are A Game

The game also provides details on a variety of real-life reform measures, including a "fair play" law introduced in Congress by Rep. John S. Tanner, Democrat of Tennessee. It also provides an online forum for players to discuss these issues.

Swain says he hopes the game will be used as a viral, grass-roots lobbying effort to open the public's eyes to this issue and to get them to take action. --Josh Fischman [The Chronicle of Higher Education]


And from a Concerned Reader in New York, NY: Plagues Are A Game

Corrupted Blood

This article is about a virtual reality plague. For the legal concept, see Attainder.
Corrupted Blood was a virtual plague that infected characters in the computer game World of Warcraft; it was also the first disease to affect any MMORPG with a significant game effect.

Information

Corrupted Blood Plague taking place in IronforgeThe plague began on September 13, 2005 when Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of World of Warcraft, introduced a new instance called Zul'Gurub into the game as part of patch 1.7. Inside this instance was a boss named Hakkar the Soulflayer, the god of blood. Players who fought Hakkar were affected by his debuff (a spell which has a negative effect over a fixed period of time). The debuff, in this case, was Corrupted Blood, a spell that caused 250–300 points of damage (compared to the average health of 5000 for a player of the highest level) every few seconds to the afflicted player. The affliction was passed on to any players standing too close to infected players. While the curse would kill most lower-level players in a matter of seconds, higher-level players could keep themselves alive (via healing spells and other means) long enough to spread the disease around the immense landscape inside the game. Death caused by the debuff did not cause any durability penalty, unlike most other causes of death in the game. NPCs, combat pets, and non-combat pets were key in spreading the plague.[1]

The disease would eventually go away as time passed or when the infected character died. The only way that a player was able to bring the disease outside of Zul'Gurub was by allowing a pet to get the debuff, dismissing the pet in less than five seconds, then summoning it in a populated area. (When dismissed, the pet retains the debuff and the timer of the buff is paused.) This debuff transmission technique was first seen with the "living bomb" debuff from Baron Geddon in Molten Core.


Scale and effect of Corrupted Blood

After a few days, Corrupted Blood had become World of Warcraft's version of the Black Death, rendering entire cities uninhabitable and causing players to avoid large clusters of other players, and in many cases, causing players to avoid major cities all together.

Due to the curse's peculiar behavior, it was never meant to leave Zul'Gurub - the ability to infect pets and NPCs was a side effect unconsidered by the developers. The intended behavior involves the final boss fight with Hakkar. Every so often, Hakkar will drain life points out of everyone in the group fighting him. However, if the group kills a much smaller, significantly less powerful enemy, the "Son of Hakkar", he releases a poisonous cloud that afflicts everyone nearby with the disease. Then, when Hakkar tries to drain life from the players, he is instead affected by the poison and is damaged instead of restored. Players need to do this procedure multiple times during the boss fight to ensure that Hakkar does not continue to restore himself. Blizzard Entertainment tried several times to fix the problem, including imposing quarantine on certain places. This "plague" was eventually "cured" by changing the mechanics of the Hakkar encounter to eliminate the spreading of the effect from player to player. Hakkar still has an ability called Corrupted Blood, but it now takes the form of a red bolt launched at a random player fighting the boss. The player and those nearby take damage, and receive a heavy damage over time, but the effect no longer spreads further.

Due to the large scale outbreak of the "plague" (some servers had half of their players infected), it drew wide attention from the media. Nina Fefferman, a Tufts University assistant research professor of public health and family medicine, calls for research on this incident, citing the resemblances with biological plagues. Some scientists want to study how people would react to environmental pathogens, by using the virtual counterpart as a point of reference.[2]

In addition, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had requested statistics on this event for research on epidemics.[3]