Researchers Play Online Game To Understand Spread Of Infectious Diseases

Infectious diseases are pretty much the number one killer of human beings on the planet, and plagues have been the cause of billions of deaths over the ages.

It goes without saying that attempting to understand how diseases spread in order to control the rate of infection goes a long way toward saving lives and making sure that an extinction level event like the ones talked about in The Walking Dead and other works of fiction never happens in real life.

With that in mind, researchers at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem conducted a study using “a simple multiplayer online game that simulates the spread of an infectious disease through a population composed of the players.” Over the course of a few weeks, the scientists used the game to figure out how people respond to epidemics. They discovered that decreasing the cost it takes for the players—or those vulnerable to the disease—to acquire protection makes it easier for them to engage in self-protection.

Players were incentivized not to acquire vaccinations by losing points for opting to do so, earning higher points that equated to a gift card at the end of the game.

In other words, because health costs are almost always prohibitively expensive, people often opt out of self-protection just to save money. By lowering the costs, players—and therefore those vulnerable to disease—would be more likely to opt in for vaccinations and other methods of disease prevention.

It’s an interesting read to say the least, made even more interesting by the use of a game to simulate real world cost-benefit analysis.

The whole paper can be read on PLOS One.

via Polygon

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