Transforming BrowserQuest into an epidemiological tool for modelling disease dissemination

Abstract

How diseases spread and their virility in human populations is the fundamental purpose of epidemiology. Historically, human behavior has been intricately linked with the spread of infectious diseases. Models to study human behavior in the context of epidemics usually concentrate on judging the effectiveness of various institutionally enforced public health measures such as school closures, not how the individuals themselves respond to the outbreak. Using a simulated or virtual environment that incorporates human behavior holds promise as a useful modelling tool. The “corrupted blood” incident that occurred in the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft led to the first large-scale, unplanned virtual epidemic in a game world. This event underscored the fact that MMORPGs can be used to study epidemiological events. Using BrowserQuest, we designed a disease management and dissemination system (DiMANDS) that monitors interactions and triggers infection events - using nonplayer characters (NPCs) as a human proxies - to spread a disease among a virtual population. The rate of infection in the NPC population was logged and a susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) graph was generated. Our results showed that our SIR graph is similar to other simulation techniques, and further strengthens the possibility of using MMORPGs as an epidemiological simulation tool.