The Calculus Diaries - Jennifer Ouellette [66]
A Rutgers University scientist named Nina Fefferman heard about the Corrupted Blood incident and became fascinated by the in-game parallels to real-world epidemics. Human behavior is not necessarily rational, or courageous, and this became obvious in World of Warcraft. True, some players tried to help with “healing spells,” but other players panicked and fled to other game spaces, carrying the disease with them. A few malicious players deliberately spread the disease—behavior that has also been documented in real-world outbreaks—and one hardy soul decided his role was to stand in the town square and narrate the carnage, a self-appointed Doomsday Prophet. There were even thrill-seekers who ignored the warnings and ventured to infected areas out of curiosity, thereby becoming infected as well—similar, says Fefferman, to journalists who travel to war zones and deliberately put themselves in harm’s way to get a story. She went on to coauthor a paper with Eric Lofgren for Lancet Infectious Diseases on the implications of the Corrupted Blood incident for refining epidemiological models.
Fefferman’s work has its naysayers, who argue that the virtual death of an avatar is not equivalent, in terms of risk, to physical death in the real world. Fefferman counters that players become quite invested in their characters and feel genuine emotional distress when those avatars are injured or killed. “The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously,” she told BBC News.
Blizzard, in turn, maintains that World of Warcraft is just a game and was never intended to mirror reality. But the parallels to real-world outbreaks are striking. An epidemiological model based on the Corrupted Blood outbreak would draw on hard data showing how players actually responded to the threat—not on abstract mathematical assumptions. And why not look to video games for insights into the spread of diseases? We’ll need all the help mathematics can give to ward off the coming zombie apocalypse. Just ask the Bennett sisters.
7
Body Heat
Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness.
—JOSEPH ADDISON, Spectator, July 12, 1711
Comedian Margaret Cho once riffed on the concept of “Stairmaster time”—namely, the fact that time passes much more slowly when one is on the Stairmaster, mindlessly climbing stairs to nowhere. Any gym member can relate: A mere fifteen minutes can feel like an hour if one lacks sufficient distraction. I am just beginning to break a sweat on an elliptical machine under the watchful eye of Adam Boesel, personal trainer and owner of the Green Microgym in Portland, Oregon, but we are not watching the usual graphic display showing pace, calories burned, or distance traveled. Instead, I am laboring to keep a small 60-watt light bulb alight with my exertions, mounted on the front of the machine, with just a single digital readout tracking my output in wattage.
Open since 2008, the Green Microgym is located in the Alberta Arts district of Portland, just fifteen minutes from the city airport. It’s a very crunchy-granola type of place, where “sustainable” is practically a way of life. The folksy main street boasts quirky little shops, art galleries, and eateries—all owned and operated by local residents. There’s nary a Starbucks