Disease and Invasion in the Multiplayer Online World

Second Life and Word Of Warcraft are "virtual worlds" created by developers and open to anyone who wants to play. Players sign up and create avatars and then interact with the virtual world and other players. According to the Wikipedia page about Second Life, its use has exploded in the last few months, going from 1,000,000 users in October to double that in mid-December 2006. World of Warcraft is a little different from Second Life, because it comes from a tradition of "Role Playing Games" (RPGs), starting with Dungeons and Dragons. World of Warcraft is massive at 7,500,000 players. Another difference between the two games is the extent to which the game has objectives. In WOW the player can gain money, skill and experience through winning fights against other players, whereas in SL there are no such developments; you develop your own goals much like in real life. What I find interesting is the particular kind of digital problems that have affected these virtual worlds. Blizzard, the developers of WOW, created a virtual disease called "Corrupted Blood" in part of their world. The disease got out of hand, because malicious players, or "griefers" intentionally spread it and laid waste to large parts of the world until Blizzard restricted its effects more decisively. Second Life has its own particular problems. Since it allows free accounts and doesn't monitor processor usage by players and you can run scripts, hackers can get away with a lot; in particular they create objects that self-replicate continuously and overload servers. Because Second Life mimics real life (RL) - for instance the money earned can be exchanged for RL money - some people have started to take it more seriously, to treat it in a similar way to RL, whereas the greifers refuse to allow that to happen unchallenged. They disrupt events by invading with multiple phalluses and swastikas, grey goo and rings.

Update 15 January: The number of WoW players has just been reported as 8 million!