Most of us don’t take video games too critically. They’re a solution to unwind, or as of late to perhaps escape from the world of Covid-19 for a short time.

However video games are additionally simulations by which actual individuals play, make choices and work together. This makes video games highly effective instruments for studying and understanding advanced conditions, resembling how illnesses unfold and even how you can deal with them.

The ‘corrupted blood’ incident

One of many first incidents that confirmed epidemiologists and well being researchers that video games may give them perception into the unfold of infectious illness occurred in 2005. A bug in World of Warcraft unleashed an “infectious disease” among the many recreation’s massive group of on-line gamers.

It began with a brand new raid encounter within the recreation designed to allowed a small group of gamers to combat an enemy that would “infect” characters with a curse known as “corrupted blood”. The curse would scale back their well being over time, and unfold from participant to participant in shut proximity.

Usually, when the character both received or misplaced the battle, the curse could be lifted as they left the zone by which it occurred. However a bug allowed gamers’ pets and minions to hold the curse into the sport’s wider digital world.

Instantly the curse was spreading throughout almost four million gamers, and the individuals who ran the sport had little management. Is that this beginning to sound eerily acquainted?

Epidemiologists had used fashions and simulations of their work earlier than, however the World of Warcraft incident was distinctive as a result of every avatar within the simulation was managed by a human participant.

What’s extra, gamers within the recreation exhibited the identical behaviours that folks do in response to a real-life pandemic.

Some gamers adopted the recommendation of the writer of the sport to keep away from contaminated areas. Others rebelled, some didn’t care, and a few camped out in distant areas away from everybody else.

These behaviours have been studied in detail by Rutgers University epidemiologists Nina Fefferman and Eric Lofgren, who then revealed a paper on the potential using games as learning tools.

Video games as simulations

There are additionally many different methods by which we will use video games as simulations to develop our understanding of world well being.

Leisure video games resembling Pandemic very instantly confer with what we’re all experiencing proper now. On this recreation, gamers collaborate as a way to combat a virus –- and in its simplicity, it might illustrate why social cohesion is so very important in our world combat in opposition to the illness but can also be very tough.

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The sport teaches communication, collaboration, and decision-making expertise within the context of disaster.

Modelling and simulation – using formal, mathematical and sometimes computerised calculations – support policy makers and world leaders to make the right decisions.

These fashions function instruments for important decisions resembling closing borders and nationwide lockdowns. It takes enormous quantities of reliable information and deep experience to develop and interpret such fashions.

A recreation like Pandemic, or World of Warcraft, lets gamers interact in simplified variations of such disaster conditions and might supply perception into human behaviour in these circumstances.

The simplified but reasonable situations enable for interplay, and studying by doing, with out the danger of real-world penalties.

Video games as laboratories

Video games may assist us to develop new medical options. In Foldit, gamers can individually work together with protein folding, an essential course of in molecular biology. It’s tough to simulate with computer systems, but it surely performs a task in drug discovery and understanding sure varieties of illnesses.

The sport makes use of numerous particular person gamers and the best scoring options are reviewed by scientists as potential new options.

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The sport takes a distributed computational method just like the SETI@Home undertaking that permit individuals lend their computer systems to the seek for extraterrestrial intelligence. The twist is that every node is – once more – a human thoughts contemplating options, and this mannequin outperforms computational algorithms making an attempt the identical activity.

In a single instance, gamers have been capable of finding an elusive HIV enzyme in simply three weeks. The sport is now being utilized instantly to looking for solutions to the coronavirus.

Video games are additionally serving to researchers higher perceive the unfold of misinformation about Covid-19, in a undertaking of the American University Game Lab. (One of many authors of this text is affiliated with the Sport Lab.)

Their recreation, Factitious, is a straightforward recreation that asks gamers to learn a small article after which determine whether it is actual or pretend information, with factors awarded for every right response. With over a million plays, the recorded dataset provides key insights into how gamers view and categorise information.

The new pandemic edition of the game is already informing us of harmful traits in rumours and deceptive info at this tough time.

Discovering one of the simplest ways ahead

Video games might supply some much-needed escape and social connection on this time of bodily distancing, however they’re additionally unbelievable instruments for studying extra about the actual world.

In areas resembling world well being, they will act as very human simulations that assist us plan for unbelievable conditions and check a number of competing concepts to give you one of the simplest ways ahead.

For the newest updates on the coronavirus, go to here.

Heide Lukosch, Affiliate Professor, University of Canterbury and Andrew M. Phelps, Professor, University of Canterbury

This text is republished from The Conversation below a Inventive Commons license. Learn the original article.