Games - Virtual plague

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	Games - Virtual plague

A virtual plague or virtual virus is an infection that can be transferred between the characters of players in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Just as a disease can spread in the real world, virtual world diseases can spread between characters in these games.

The "Guinea Pig Virus"

In May 2000 the creators of The Sims came under fire from gamers after numerous characters became infected after guinea pig bites. The contagious disease killed many characters and angered the players. Maxis, the game's creators, changed the result of the bite to being a lot less virulent.

The "Corrupted Blood" Plague

:See Corrupted blood for more information In September 2005, the Zul'Gurub dungeon was introduced into World of Warcraft, bringing in Hakkar, the god of blood. When this character was defeated, characters present were affected by a spell called Corrupted Blood, which caused 250-300 points of damage for every second the character was infected, and would spread to infect any nearby characters. The infection would only last for five seconds, but characters could become re-infected.

The Corrupted Blood Plague was believed to have begun when a party of players discovered that pets and NPCs could be infected. Infecting a pet, they released it within one of the cities within the game. Low-level characters and NPCs were infected, the former dying almost immediately while the latter became a carrier and were considered a key reason for the plague's rapid spread.

After a few days, Corrupted Blood has become World of Warcraft's version of the Black Plague, rendering entire cities uninhabitable and causing players to avoid large clusters of other players, and in many cases, stop playing altogether. It is widely suspected that, due to the curse's peculiar behavior, it was never meant to leave Zul'Gurub - the ability to infect pets and NPCs a side effect unconsidered by the programmers. Blizzard Entertainment tried several times to fix the problem, including imposing quarantine on certain places, eventually finding a 'cure'.

The "Grey Plague"

On Tuesday, October 11, at 2:51 AM, players in the online world Kingdom of Loathing were greeted by Cristobal Colon, a Christopher Columbus based character, who had recently arrived from across the sea. In what appeared to be a friendly gesture he begin to give out Comfy Blankets, and later sold them for those who didn't get them. For the next three weeks the Kingdom of Loathing was affected by a communicable virus which came to be known as the Grey Plague for its symptom, greying of the player's font in chat and adding a random -cough- to their "speech". (It was also called 'KoLera', 'KoLeprosy', 'KoLd', 'Jicken Pox', and 'Blanket AIDS',) The disease was traced to the blankets, but could be spread through messages from infected players (both in chat and the messaging system "kmail.")

The plague came along with the advent of Temporal Rifts, and the kingdom's government (The Council of Loathing) commissioned a special rift 28 days into the future of the "Seaside Town," the game's central location. In the traditional KoL fashion of mixing parodies, the plague turned out to be a zombie plague, and players traversing the rift were greeted to a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested nightmare world. The game's resident doctor claimed to have invented a miracle cure, but players could be re-infected afterwards.

The Council put out a call to all players to seek a cure. Eventually an innoculation against the disease, Ofuxxor™, was introduced, in the form of a blowgun with a warning label stating that women who are pregnant or men who are impregnated with alien embryos should not take Ofuxxor, and had side effects including lack of marmosets. Players could get it by bringing a Zombie Pineal Gland to the right NPC and could use it on themselves or on other players. The plague wound down after that, and eventually the "infected" counter read 0 on November 5, 2005.

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