You might have heard of the online game, World of Warcraft. It has 8 million players in any given month. On September 13, 2005, the game became infected with a blood plague. It was started intentionally by the game designers and was to have been restricted to a particular area of the game. But somehow, it got out and in no time, was killing off everything in site, including characters that players might have spent years building up.
The game developers and members of the community attempted to slow the spread by warning other players to avoid certain areas of the game, or to simply stay away from each other for a while (i.e., self-isolate). Many tried to comply, but some refused and instead, headed into infected cities or from those cities into clean areas of the game, where they infected everyone else. The plague raged throughout the game until the only solution was a reboot.
When Covid hit, some health experts considered what could be learned from the World of Warcraft experience. But ultimately, it was determined that the best way to stop the growth of a pandemic is selfless action by individuals for the greater good, and at least one civilization (albeit online) had already proven incapable of taking action for that common good.
Why did so many players act in ways that would feed the online plague instead of stop it? And in real life, why were there Covid parties –throw to see how many people could be infected? What causes us to react in such selfish ways when the result of doing so could be illness or death?
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