Happy 20th Anniversary To The Corrupted Blood Incident!

When epidemiologists desperately needed realistic human behavior models, World of Warcraft players delivered the goods! Back in 2005, a virtual plague called "Corrupted Blood" accidentally escaped from a raid dungeon and spread throughout the game world. Players did exactly what real humans do in pandemics—some helped, some fled to isolated areas, and some deliberately infected others for chaos. Scientists studied this unplanned digital disaster and gained unprecedented insights into pandemic behavior that traditional models couldn't capture. Twenty years later, epidemiologists are still citing this accidental experiment in research papers. Gaming for science? Now that's what I call efficient multitasking!