It's the opposite of when Valve hired a Chief Economist in 2012[1]. We've come full circle.
[1]http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/06/18/yanis_varoufa...
[1]http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/06/18/yanis_varoufa...
My favorite story, though, is still epidemiologists studying the Corrupted Blood plague in WoW for real world lessons on bioterrorism.
The craziest part was that the players who intentionally spread the plague would retreat to other regions and log out in an attempt to incubate the disease across victim die-off and mod actions, then return to cities to reinfect people. That's what got epidemiologists hooked, because disease control in the face of enemy action is (fortunately) short on real-world data.
The question of how the plague could be resolved without server-level actions (which are obviously unavailable in the real world) is awfully interesting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident
There was also an event in EVE that is cool, though I'm not aware of it being studied in the manny of Corrupted Blood. Someone forgot to pay a recurring security fee, opening a system up for capture. War ensues and $300k worth of in-game spacecraft is destroyed.
It is pretty usual for viral infections to have a range of effects with only a small percent (~15% in the case of measles I believe) of people getting sick enough to report it. I don't know what that number is for ebola but it always seemed to me the initial estimates of its virulance were going to be high. I mean, nobody was going to go reporting flu like symptoms in an african village to the CDC.
The question occurred to me when I heard about the epidemiology of Ebola in pre-Spanish South America. Supposedly (haven't verified) the disease incubated in wild animals, and occasionally crossed over into human populations. What limited an epidemic was that travel was slow and rare enough that the disease would spread and debilitate a single settlement before anyone could transfer it too far. (Obviously late-stage patients don't do a lot of traveling.)
So the question becomes why this hasn't changed with increased access to travel. Quarantine measures and sensible behavior appear to be the answer for inadvertent spread, but what's stopped malicious transfer? Is it just too hard to find and contract before quarantine goes into place? Is it tactically or psychologically unappealing for the groups willing to use other suicide tactics?
I mean, consider that doctor who realized that he'd been infected. He freaked, and fled to South Africa for treatment. He survived, but a nurse who treated him died. What if she had been slow to show symptoms, and had infected family and friends? What if she had a side business as a prostitute?
Anyway, enough of that. Now I'm reminded of Ebola Syndrome aka Yi boh lai beng duk (伊波拉病毒). It's a rather gross Hong Kong horror film. But like the Living Dead films, it's very funny at times.