A recent trend in gaming has been to expand a player's sense of freedom to limitless possibilities. Of course, complete freedom is merely an illusion created by game developers and programmers. Gameplay cannot extend past the scope of what the code dictates. Or can it? An event in the consistent online gaming world has evolved past the programmers' original intent, while still obeying the rules that were established to govern it.
The game in question is the popular online role-playing game, \World of Warcraft,"" and it has recently garnered a lot of attention for something that happened within its perpetual virtual universe. Reports describe the spread of a blood-borne pathogen within the game; a virtual plague, if you will.
The story goes like this: a group of players on a quest entered a dungeon and encountered a certain boss. One of the boss's attacks infected a player with this virus. Upon defeating the boss a player became infected and was able to get into the game's town. When the virus finally took the best of that person, he exploded, infecting everyone in their blast radius.
The nature of the virus is such that whenever an infected person dies because of it, they explode and infect everyone around them. It does massive amounts of damage very quickly to the person infected. Only high-level players were supposed to encounter this plague, survive long enough to be healed, and then leave the dungeon without anybody being the wiser. Lower level players die almost immediately from this, leading, in some cases, to crowds of people exploding almost instantaneously, with one or two high level players surviving to contaminate others.
The world that the game takes place in is so well established and simulated that even non-player characters, were getting infected and dying. What's bizarre is that this didn't really upset that many players. People thought it was fun, surprising, and really cool that something like this could take place.
What makes this remarkable is its unexpectedness. It is not a glitch or a bug. It is not some hack by a bunch of kids somewhere. Everything that has transpired has done so according the laws of the game. As of right now, the source code has not been modified to fix the problem. Instead, GMs, or game masters, have quarantined players to ebb the spread of the problem while a permanent solution can be worked out. The specifics of the event may not seem too exciting to anybody other than WoW players, or college newspaper video game journalists, but the fact that the event took place has ignited a lot of excitement about the future of games.
Game developers have many tools for creating content. Graphics and physics engines can be licensed to help ease the burden of creating next generation games. As different software packages with very specific purposes are developed, it is very conceivable to have more instances like this occurring in virtual space.
As games become more complex, realistic, and engaging developers will do their best to create living, breathing worlds for players to explore and experience. The illusion of free form game play and a persistent virtual realm that series like ""Grand Theft Auto,"" and ""The Elder Scrolls,"" try to purvey may become closer and closer to reality. We have seen the first accidental step in ""WoW.""
Jason's column runs every other Wednesday. He can be reached at jmducat@gmail.com
