It wasn’t so much that I was surprised to see Lewis H. Lapham of all people chuckling it up about his time in WoW in this month’s Harper’s, but it was the anxiety that came over me with the near simultaneously hit of the Economist reporting praise for the big-pixel world as a locus for future epidemiological research. What is going on? Lapham — editor, raconteur, actor, and general bon vivant — goes at length in his article to explain that if leaders in America had better access and insight and memory for what what war is really like, and not what their stony ancestors might want them to believe, Iraq and other poor adventures might be better planned. WoW comes in at the end of the editorial as a light hearted hope that it might provide a better conduit for certain power brokers to exercise off their competitive edge than what’s happening now overseas. Lost for an hour in the Elwynn Forest among the Murloc Oracles of Crystal Lake, I began to hope for rescue by Kissinger or Brzezinski, operating as the online avatars of Bismark and Maximus, sending reinforcements (in the personae of dwarves and shadow priests) from their computers in Washington… Here at last was the world in which they could do what the Romans could do… drifting in the same orbit as the one imagined by Carl von Clausewitz, Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr…

The Economist today, on the other hand, puts a more serious light on the only game any non-player in the West has heard about. Two epidemiologists at Rutgers (of course) proposed in this week’s Lancet Infectious Diseases that “games such ‘World of Warcraft’ might be used to work out how people will react when faced with situations no researcher can ethically introduce into the real world.” They are referring to, of course, the griefing episode of players who had their pets infected in Zul’Gurub. Once corrupted, the griefers would then happily call out their pets in newbie zones and auction houses across the world, killing pretty quickly any players less than level 50. Good times. The researches are hoping that introducing similar simulated diseases might give them some insight into how real world infections might be spread or coped with. Who knows? With the customary addendum by Nick Yee, the Economist leaves off wondering if this is at all realistic or worthwhile, but does note that only permadeath might have a real appeal to participants (“…only real plagues kill real people, though the permanent loss of a character can be a traumatic experience for an experienced [read, 'obsessive'] player, and one he will try hard to avoid.”). Funny how everything always comes back to permadeath, isn’t it?

What is also interesting is that in two cases two prominent magazines think it’s completely rational to propose that large scale virtual worlds might be put to better use than grinding. That a “serious games” angle might be worth pursuing, where player behaviors and transactions could be tracked and modeled outside the game world. That’s what is unstated — that there’s a professional service other than the game and its support companies can sell; namely, the game life of its customers.

It’s not impossible to see some companies eventually marketing their worlds therapeutically, as places to relax or burn off aggression. But it’s hard to imagine credible games being built around them. More realistically, I could see the large providers easily agreeing — at a cost — to have parts of their worlds modeled by the big data mining companies (LexisNexis, ChoicePoint, DoubleClick/Google). I just wonder if my behavior and gameplay in a virtual world was not my own to keep. Should the record of your recreation not be private, or least kept with the provider? We’ll see. Everyone? We have a new Raid leader tonight.