Intended and Accidental Spread of Virtual Plagues in Massively

En öppen föreläsning av Stefan Johansson (se inbjudan nedan), intressant ämne. Vill ni studera mer om detta finns kurserna i Tillämpad AI under hösten i åk 3.

/Mikael

Stefan Johansson, assistant professor at Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH),
will give a docent lecture on Monday the 19th of May between 10:00-11:00
at BTH, Campus Ronneby, in the lecture room Safiren. The title of the lecture is
Intended and Accidental Spread of Virtual Plagues in Massively
Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs)

During the last three years, we have experienced several outbreaks of Virtual Plagues
in MMORPGs, among them the Corrupted Blood plague in the game World of Warcraft.
From a player perspective, such an outbreak may enrich the player experience and be
an enjoyable disruptive element in a game, but it may also clearly have a negative
impact on the players if it decreases the performance of the game character too much.

From a designer perspective, virtual plagues may be well designed, complex mechanisms
for spreading properties that decrease the performance of the game characters, but they
may also be the result of a flaw in the design or implementation.

From a research perspective, it may be tempting to use MMORPG as a platform for studying
virtual plagues in order to gain knowledge about the spread of real diseases.

There are however a number of issues concerned the latter view and I will during this lecture
try to explain the views of these actors and motivate why games is not the ideal platform for
studying real disease spread.

The lecture is open for the public, and will take approximately 45 minutes,
followed by questions and a discussion.