Why are we doomed if swine flu is legit? Blame World of Warcraft

Things are looking up on the swine flu front, as deaths are trending down, but we're certainly not out of the woods yet. And God help us if this thing goes pandemic, because experience tells us that in the modern era, government-mandated quarantines simply don't work very well.

How do we know this? Experts are looking to the popular video game World of Warcraft, which has become useful as a surprisingly applicable example of how quarantines work in the real world -- or rather, how they often don't.

Some backstory: In 2005, World of Warcraft's developers were looking for a way to reduce the power of some of the game's most powerful characters. Their answer: A virtual virus called "Corrupted Blood" which would deal damage to anyone infected with it over time and which was designed to automatically spread to other nearby characters who wandered by. But Corrupted Blood spread beyond the area in which it was supposed to be contained, and soon the "illness" was out of control -- with weaker characters infected by Corrupted Blood dying in droves.

Dying in WoW isn't quite as horrible as dying in real life, but it does have consequences, causing players to lose power and items and so on. Corrupted Blood had an effectiveness of 100% if you came near an infected player, and the only precaution that would prevent infection was staying away from others with the virus. WoW developer Blizzard issued a strict quarantine in an attempt to control the outbreak, but despite all of this, most players simply ignored it.

The result: Four million of the then-six million players ended up infected, and a reported million-plus "died" as a result. Blizzard ultimately had to give up on containment and reset its servers to get things back in order.

Now the Corrupted Blood incident is being analyzed again as a fascinating model for the way real-world disease can spread despite the best intentions of the powers that be. While the CDC may want quarantined individuals to stay put and uninfected individuals to keep out of danger zones, human nature compels different behaviors. With Corrupted Blood, curiosity seekers would wander in to the hot zone anyway to see what the fuss was all about, and more malicious players would intentionally break the quarantine to attempt to infect others. And of course many more people just carried on with their virtual lives, unfazed by the risks and uninterested in changing their routines. All of these behaviors have analogues in the real world, too, and they could -- and likely will -- happen again. Lock your doors.