World of Warcraft Could Help Fight COVID-19, Social Rejection Can Fuel Creativity, and What Mouse Facial Expressions Teach Us About Emotion

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Self-improvement, Science, Astronomy, Education

4.6 • 935 Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2020

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Learn about how studying World of Warcraft helped researchers learn how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic; how scientists described mouse facial expressions for the first time; and how social rejection can fuel creativity.

Scientists studied a "pandemic" in World of Warcraft to learn how to fight a real virus by Grant Currin

Fenlon, W. (2020, March 13). The researchers who once studied WoW’s Corrupted Blood plague are now fighting the coronavirus. Pcgamer; PC Gamer. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-researchers-who-once-studied-wows-corrupted-blood-plague-are-now-fighting-the-coronavirus/
World of Warcraft experienced a pandemic in 2005. That experience may help coronavirus researchers. (2020, April 9). The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/04/09/world-warcraft-experienced-pandemic-2005-that-experience-may-help-coronavirus-researchers/
Lofgren, E. T., & Fefferman, N. H. (2007). The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 7(9), 625–629. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1473-3099(07)70212-8

Scientists have described mouse facial expressions for the first time by Steffie Drucker

The facial expressions of mice. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/m-tfe033120.php
Dolensek, N., Gehrlach, D. A., Klein, A. S., & Gogolla, N. (2020). Facial expressions of emotion states and their neuronal correlates in mice. Science, 368(6486), 89–94. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaz9468

In some people, social rejection can fuel creativity by Kelsey Donk

Khazan, O. (2020, March 16). Are Weird People More Creative? The Atlantic; The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/the-perks-of-being-a-weirdo/606778/
Kim, S. H., Vincent, L. C., & Goncalo, J. A. (2013). Outside advantage: Can social rejection fuel creative thought? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(3), 605–611. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029728

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0:00.0	Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from
0:04.8	Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about how
0:09.2	studying World of Warcraft helped researchers learn how to fight the coronavirus, how scientists described mouse facial expressions for the first time,
0:17.0	and how social rejection can fuel creativity.
0:20.0	When satisfy some curiosity.
0:22.0	You know the video game World of Warcraft?
0:25.0	It's an extremely popular, massively multiplayer online role-playing game
0:30.0	that might have caused your college roommate to fail a class or two.
0:33.4	And believe it or not, here's something else it did.
0:35.9	It helps researchers understand how to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
0:40.5	Yeah, let's talk about the corrupted blood incident.
0:45.0	On September 13, 2005, a plague devastated the cities of Ogramar and Iron Forge.
0:52.0	It quickly spread to other cities which made the number of deaths
0:55.9	skyrocket. Before long, more than 4 million were affected by the outbreak. Orgramar and Iron Forge may be fictional, but this digital
1:05.3	disease was real, even if it only existed in the online servers of World
1:09.8	of Warcraft. And in the years following this plague, researchers published multiple peer-reviewed papers about the unusual event to study how people behave when faced with an outbreak.
1:21.0	Like I said, incredible, right? So let me get into the details of what happened.
1:26.1	Unlike our current outbreak, the World of Warcraft pandemic really was the product of an
1:31.1	experiment gone wrong. It originated in an update to the game
1:34.8	that let experienced players encounter a winged serpent called Hakar the Soul Flair.
1:40.9	He would occasionally infect opponents with a digital disease called corrupted blood.
1:46.0	It wasn't a big deal for the powerful players who had earned access to the new area of the game.
	...

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