DOUBLE BILL: When a Plague Struck World of Warcraft/Blood on the Tracks
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Pushkin. Hello, Tim Harford here, and I have a special start to the year for you. I've been sitting on some great ideas for gripping cautionary tales. Their story is full of exactly the kind of instructive downfalls and disasters I love, but I've never quite found the right place to tell them during our normal shows. They're cracking yarns that just don't require a full episode to recount. That's why I came up with Cautionary Tales shorts. And

And so far, these bite-sized stories have only been available to Pushkin Plus subscribers. But I'm going to let you hear two of them here, back to back. The first of our cautionary tale shorts starts in another world. Just another day in Azeroth. Some citizens are enjoying themselves, indulging in the everyday activities that Azeroth has to offer. Exploring. Accepting quests. Trading.

Hanging out with their pet scorpids and octopodes, or getting into fights. Living their best lives in a fantasy kingdom. But for the mighty heroes, tough enough to enter the unexplored jungle realm of Zul'Gurub, the expectation was that they would leave a dream and enter a nightmare. The domain of the blood god, Hakkar the Soul Flayer. What am I talking about?

a computer game called World of Warcraft. But on that particular day, September the 13th, 2005, something was happening inside that computer game that was to become strangely prophetic. The nightmare of Hakkar the Soul Flayer was not going to be confined to Zul'Gurub. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES

World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. That means hundreds of thousands of people are online at the same time, able to interact with each other by talking, trading, brawling, casting spells or teaming up in epic battles.

Stories in World of Warcraft emerge from what the players do as they interact together, reacting to what the game throws at them. In Warcraft, those players take on the role of fantastical characters, such as crafty rogues, virtuous paladins or amoral warlocks.

Players who play a lot have characters who levelled up, becoming tougher and tougher, effectively becoming a mythical hero in a world filled with mediocrities. Mythical heroes need worthy challenges, and that is why, from time to time, Blizzard Entertainment, the company that produces World of Warcraft, adds new realms, new quests, new and terrible foes.

Foes such as the blood god Hakkar the Soul Flayer, who lurked deep in the realm of Zul'Gurub. As soon as Blizzard Entertainment rolled out the software update that created Zul'Gurub, curious players naturally sent their characters in to have a look.

Inexperienced, low-level characters didn't stand a chance. Either they were slain or they quickly retreated to safer regions. Zul'Gurub was designed to be a tough challenge for high-level characters, the mightiest heroes in the world. Hakkar the Soul Flayer could place a curse on people with the temerity to confront him. A curse called Corrupted Blood.

If your character had corrupted blood, the game would depict a fountain of gore spurting from them with a squelching sound, and their health would start draining away. That could be fatal almost immediately for low-level characters, but for the high-level heroes fighting Hakkar the Soul Flayer, it was more of an inconvenience.

They could keep themselves alive while the curse lasted. After a while, it expired. Oh, and the other thing about corrupted blood? It was contagious. It would spread between allies from one character to another if they didn't socially distance. Is this starting to ring any bells?

Diseases spread when their carriers move around. It could be fleas on rats in the hold of a sailing ship carrying the Black Death across the world, or infected air passengers moving coronavirus around at the speed of an airliner. In World of Warcraft, people move even faster. They teleport.

Players of World of Warcraft don't pay their subscription fees just so their characters can walk around for weeks on end, and so the game allows characters to teleport instantly from a dangerous area like Zul'Gurub to a safe, well-populated city. You can see where this is going. A powerful, infected character could blink out of a titanic struggle in the heart of Zul'Gurub and reappear in the middle of a densely populated city, spreading the curse.

Blizzard Entertainment didn't want that to happen. Corrupted Blood was supposed to be a challenge only for those who chose to enter Zul'Gurub. So, Blizzard's programmers included a line of code that would automatically cancel the Corrupted Blood effect at the moment that a character left the battle with Hakkar. Except, for some reason, Corrupted Blood escaped from Zul'Gurub anyway.

In Azeroth's busy cities, it spread to low-level characters who would be dead in a few seconds. It also spread to the computer-controlled characters that kept the game's economy running in the background. These bot characters were nobody special. Market traders, innkeepers, priests or town guards.

But in the cities, these bots were everywhere. Because it was the simplest way to keep the game running smoothly, these computer characters were programmed to be almost immortal. Not a problem, usually. But now, it meant that they could serve as asymptomatic carriers of the curse.

Great. Now you have these invulnerable extras strolling around in the background of the game, serving drinks and snacks with a side order of deadly, corrupted blood. The stage was set for the world's first virtual pandemic. It had started in a remote corner of the world and spread to the cities. With hindsight, it was all a little prescient.

At Tufts University's Centre for Modelling Infectious Diseases, Nina Pfefferman's phone rang. It was a student of hers, Eric Lofgren. Lofgren was a keen World of Warcraft player, and he and Pfefferman had been talking about the game's potential as a research tool. They weren't the only academics to be interested.

Scientists and social scientists were waking up to the possibility that these complex, highly social games might be a terrific source of real-world insight. Economists, for example, were asking, could we study inflation by deliberately flooding a virtual world with gold coins? What would happen? How would people react?

And epidemiologists like Lofgren and Pfefferman were wondering whether they could learn something by persuading a gaming company to unleash a public health emergency on a virtual world. Although Lofgren was on the other end of the phone line, Pfefferman could hear that he was excited. Log into the game, said Lofgren. That thing we were talking about, it's happening. Corrupted blood was spreading fast.

Characters strong enough not to be killed instantly would flee the plague-infested cities, carrying the curse with them. The computer bot characters would stroll around as their programming dictated, looking innocent but spreading death. And some players, curious to see what the fuss was about, sent their characters into infected areas to have a look at the pools of blood and the piles of virtual skeletons.

The result was that the curse spread with unimaginable speed. Early in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, before the lockdowns, the number of people infected doubled every two or three days. The number of characters infected with corrupted blood doubled every nine minutes.

World of Warcraft seems like one big game, but in practice, for technical reasons, there are lots of parallel game servers, each hosting a few thousand players. Outbreaks happened on different game servers at different times. Whenever they did, it would take mere hours before every vulnerable character on that server was either dead or hiding somewhere, very remote. The gaming community was abuzz with the news.

What was going on? In the first server to be affected, Ironforge, the dwarven capital, was quick to succumb to the plague. Surviving characters just saw piles of skeletons, marking where countless others had perished. The capital of the orcs, Orgrimmar, fared no better. Within hours it was overrun. Players scrambled to keep their characters out of harm's way.

As the epidemiologists Pfeffermann and Lofgren watched the virtual pandemic unfold, some of what they saw surprised them. They were amazed to see some characters rushing heroically towards the danger, casting healing spells to try to stop the spread, even at the cost of their own lives. Altruistic players were risking harm to a character they'd long cherished because they wanted to do the right thing.

That wasn't something you saw in the epidemiological models. Another surprise was the appearance of what, with hindsight, we might call plague idiots. Players who deliberately contracted an infection and spread it around. Or who accidentally did so, first by recklessly running in to see what the fuss was about and then by running away again. Corrupted blood, after all, was, like Covid, fairly harmless to some and deadly to others.

And some people don't much care about others. Misinformation circulated. Everyone seemed to be promoting a cure. All the cures were snake oil. And conspiracy theories circulated too, as the players of the game tried to figure out a question that has become all too familiar. Did someone do this on purpose?

Did the game's designers think it would be fun to introduce an utterly deadly, mind-bendingly transmissible disease into their fantasy world? Was it a disgruntled employee trying to sabotage the game? Maybe some rogue epidemiologists had whispered into Blizzard's ears and persuaded them to run a grand experiment. Blizzard Entertainment weren't telling. They had their hands full as their initial puzzlement turned to alarm.

It was really scary, said the lead engineer, John Cash. We didn't know why it was happening. Remember that I mentioned that characters had pets? Cats, spiderlings, giant snails, that sort of thing. Well, those pets proved to be the vector for corrupted blood escaping Zul'Gurub and spreading in the cities. The programmers had failed to anticipate how that might happen.

Much like real-world virologists overlooking some flaw in their biosecurity measures that allows a virus they're studying to accidentally escape from the lab. Perish the thought. And now, corrupted blood was making the game unplayable. You couldn't do very much in World of Warcraft if you didn't periodically visit the cities. And with the cities piled high with bones and blood, that wasn't very appealing.

Blizzard Entertainment tried to organise a voluntary quarantine on the affected game servers. It did not work. Too many players broke the rules. Blizzard didn't really have the option of imposing a lockdown. Who would choose to spend their time being a mythical hero in a magical realm if they're forced to stay at home all day? Blizzard did have one godlike power that sadly wasn't open to human leaders in early 2020.

they could take the entire game offline to reset it. They didn't want to do that. It would be disruptive and embarrassing. But World of Warcraft was so complex that its creators weren't sure if there was another way to fix it. Years later, when Covid began to spread in earnest, there was a flurry of newspaper articles asking what the corrupted blood pandemic might tell us about the real one.

A lot, said Wired magazine. World of Warcraft perfectly predicted our coronavirus pandemic. Maybe. Some of the parallels are unsettling. But while the epidemiologists Eric Lofgren and Nina Pfefferman did indeed scrutinise the virtual pandemic for real-world insights, they concluded that, as scientists, they hadn't learned as much as they'd hoped.

Lofgren and Pfefferman published an article in the medical journal The Lancet, arguing that the World of Warcraft plague was a tantalising missed opportunity for epidemiologists. It was too different to a real epidemic, and Blizzard Entertainment hadn't shared enough data about what happened. Epidemiologists are still eager to watch realistic plagues unfold inside computer games, but games companies aren't so keen.

After a few days, Blizzard decided to bite the bullet. It took the game offline, updated the software and rebooted the servers. The corrupted blood plague was over. Our next Cautionary Tales short deals not with virtual blood shared in a computer-generated world, but the real kind. Shared in the most catastrophic way, following a series of seemingly mundane errors. More of that after the break.

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A year into the First World War, British soldiers are being sent to fight in Gallipoli, in what's now northern Turkey. 500 men from the 1st Battalion of the 7th Royal Scots have boarded a train in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the middle of the night. It's taking them south to Liverpool, England, where a ship is waiting to carry them to the front. They haven't been told where they're going, but they have been issued with sun helmets, so it's not hard to guess.

It's an old train. The carriage is made from wood and lit by natural gas, stored in tanks underneath them. It shouldn't really be in service anymore. Modern trains are made from steel and lit with electric. But this is wartime. One of the soldiers is 18-year-old Peter Stoddart. We were full of expectation through the night we chatted and played cards. But Peter and his friends aren't going to make it to the bloody battlefield of Gallipoli.

Many won't even get to England. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. Quintins Hill is a railway junction just on the Scottish side of the border with England. There's a signal box and four tracks.

The two tracks in the middle are the mainlines, one going north into Scotland, one going south to England. And off to the side of each mainline there's a loop of track where slow trains can be parked and wait while faster trains can go by.

Inside the signal box are rows of great mechanical levers that the signalmen throw to operate both the points that allow trains to switch from one track to another and move brightly coloured signal arms up and down the tracks that tell the train drivers to stop and go, a bit like traffic lights on a road. Signalman George Meakin had been on the night shift at Quintins Hill. At six in the morning, he should have handed over to the day shift signalman, James Tinsley.

Meakin and Tinsley were friends. They'd been doing shifts in this signal box for years, and they had something else in common. Neither enjoyed getting up early in the morning. So they'd agreed between themselves that whoever was on the day shift would sleep for a bit longer and come in at around half past six, not six o'clock sharp. For Tinsley, this arrangement had an additional benefit. It meant he could sometimes come to work on a slow local train,

Usually that local train went straight past Quintins Hill without stopping. But sometimes the northbound express train from London to Glasgow would be running late. And that took priority. The slow local train would pull off the main line onto a loop at Quintins Hill to let the express train go past. That morning, May 22nd, 1915, James Tinsley hitched a ride to work on the local train. It arrived at Quintins Hill at half past six.

George Meakin, in the signal box, had to get it off the northbound mainline to make way for the delayed express. But he couldn't put it on the side loop because that was already occupied by a freight train. That happens sometimes. So Meakin switched the northbound local train onto the southbound mainline. He could sit and wait there instead. The local train ground to a halt. Tinsley hopped off and went up to the signal box to start work for the day.

He'd brought the daily newspaper and handed it to Meakin. Meakin handed Tinsley the notes he'd made on a scrap piece of paper about everything he'd done since six o'clock. Tinsley would copy them into the official logbook in his own handwriting so it would appear to their superiors that the shifts had changed at six o'clock, as the rules said they must.

Right, mate, here's the situation, Meakin says. There's a goods train on the northbound side loop. We've got to clear the northbound mainline for the express. So I've parked your local train on the southbound mainline, as you know. There's an empty coal train going south, and I'm sending that to wait on the southbound side loop. And the next train that'll want to come south is a troop train. Got it? Well, have you got it?

Back on the troop train, the soldiers have started to drift off to sleep. The train rumbles south. It approaches the village of Kirkpatrick, four miles from the border with England. The track starts to slope gently downwards, and the train begins to pick up speed. At Kirkpatrick station, there's another signal box. An empty coal train has just passed Kirkpatrick, going south.

At 6.34am, the signalman at Kirkpatrick learns from Quintins Hill that the empty coal train is no longer on the southbound main line. It's been safely moved onto the loop. He assumes that means the line is clear for the troop train, but he has to check. And this is a time before radios and telephones were widespread. Messages are sent by a telegraph that rings alarm bells.

At 6.43am, he asks Quintins Hill, can I send the troop train through? Yes, comes the reply. The track's clear. But of course, it's not. The local train, the train that brought Tinsley to work, is still parked on it. The signalman at Kirkpatrick doesn't know that. He watches the troop train hurtle past.

Researchers who study workplace safety sometimes make a distinction between work as imagined and work as done. The idea is that what's written down in training manuals and rule books and operating procedures might not always correspond to what employees actually do in practice. The railway rule book, for example, says that the night shift ends at 6 o'clock precisely.

As we've seen, that's not what happened at Quintins Hill. Meakin and Tinsley routinely swapped at around half past six instead, but they had to hide that from their superiors. So at six o'clock, whoever was on the night shift stopped writing in the logbook and switched to a scrap of paper instead.

The logbook can't tell us who sent that signal at 6.34 to say that the empty coal train had left the southbound mainline.

Meakin will later say he's sure it was Tinsley. Tinsley thinks it must have been Meakin. No wonder neither of them can remember. They know that whoever sent that signal should have followed up with another signal to tell Kirkpatrick that the southbound mainline was nonetheless still blocked. Now by the local train, but nobody does. The levers in the signal box correspond to the tracks, the mainlines and side loops.

The rules say that when a track is blocked, the signalman puts a ring or collar on the lever as a visual reminder. Some even say TRAIN HERE in big letters. That's work as imagined by the rule writers. In practice, Meakin and Tinsley didn't bother with it. That's work as done.

Whenever a train stops for more than a few minutes, the rules say someone from the train has to visit the signal box to remind the signalman they're there, check there's a collar on the lever, and sign the logbook to say they've done this. The fireman from the local train signed the logbook, but he didn't check for a collar. Who uses those? And he didn't feel the need to remind Tinsley that the train was there. After all, Tinsley had only just got off it.

If you imagine that work always happens exactly as the rulebook dictates, it's hard to see how any signalman could forget about a train on the line. When you look at how work was actually done, it becomes less inexplicable.

Here's another example. According to the rules, the staff from the trains shouldn't stay in the signal box for a moment longer than necessary to exchange critical information, so as not to risk distracting the signalman from his duties. In practice, they might naturally hang around for a chat. When Tinsley gets to the signal box, the brakesman from the goods train is there. The rules say Meakin should leave as soon as he comes off duty.

But he doesn't. He settles down to read the newspaper. The fireman from the local train turns up. So does the brakesman from the empty coal train. Meechan passes on the latest news about the war. When 'work is done' departs from 'work is imagined' like this, whose fault is it? The traditional approach is to blame 'work is done'. But rules can sometimes be cumbersome or unrealistic.

Eric Holnagel is an academic who studies safety in the healthcare sector. He argues that we should always be keen to close the gap between work as done and work as imagined, but we should keep an open mind about whether it's the rules or the behaviour that needs to adapt. He gives the example of a hospital, where the written procedures say nurses should take blood samples from patients only when a doctor requests them,

But nurses routinely take samples from very ill patients before the doctor has arrived. It saves precious time. Should the nurses be reprimanded or should the rulebook be amended? To close the gap between work as imagined and work as done, managers need to understand what workers actually do. And workers need to feel free to be honest.

If the railway managers knew that the signalmen didn't always use the lever collars, they might have come up with a better system. If Meakin and Tinsley had felt free to ask, "Can we change shifts at 6:30?" They wouldn't have needed their subterfuge with the logbook. Tinsley sets about copying the entries from Meakin's scrap of paper into the logbook. Meakin and the train workers are chatting about the war news.

Tinsley hears the signal from Kirkpatrick. Is the southbound main line clear? The lever isn't in the position that would remind him the line is blocked and he responds without thinking. Yes, the line is clear. The train he arrived on has slipped his mind entirely. On the troop train, 18-year-old Peter Stoddart is jolted awake as he's thrown across the carriage. What on earth is going on? SCREAMS

Watching from the signal box, a horrified James Tinsley and George Meakin see exactly what's happened. The troop train has ploughed into the local train on the southbound mainline. It was going much too fast to stop in time. The old wooden carriages of the troop train are now scattered zigzag across both tracks. Tinsley and Meakin know what's about to happen too.

The late running London to Glasgow Express is powering up the northbound mainline, straight at the debris. It won't be able to stop in time either. In the troop train, Peter Stoddart tries to get up, then tries again, but something is pinning down his left leg. He hears the steam whistle of the express and the desperate screeching of brakes. Then everything goes dark.

When Stoddart comes to again, he finds himself halfway down an embankment. I looked up and there was a little lark singing its damned head off, he remembers. I saw my mate a few yards away. He was laughing like hell at me. I put my arms out to him and it was only his head. His head with his mouth and eyes open. I broke down and started to cry. I don't know for how long. Stoddart gets to his feet.

and scrambles up the embankment. It's carnage. There are body parts everywhere. Some soldiers had wriggled free of the troop train into the path of the onrushing express. Many more are trapped, and they can't be rescued because the wooden carriages are burning fiercely. The crash has punctured the gas cylinders, and the hot coals from the steam engine have set the gas alight.

Three railway staff died at Quintins Hill and nine passengers from the local train and the express. But it was on the troop train that the heaviest toll fell. The Royal Scots lost 214 soldiers. Only 83 of the bodies could ever be identified. The Scottish Court took the traditional approach. They blamed the workers, not the rules.

they found that work as done was entirely at fault. Meakin and Tinsley were found guilty of culpable homicide. Both spent a year in prison. But when they got out, the railway company gave them jobs again. Perhaps the bosses knew, deep down, that their own rules had also been to blame. It's always easy to find fault with work as done. But work as imagined...

had played its part too. For a list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley, with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughan. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts.

It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutteridge, Stella Harford and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Royston Besserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Daniela Lacan and Maya Koenig.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. And if you want to hear the show ad-free and listen to exclusive Cautionary Tales shorts, then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft.

and not everyone who handles your personal info is as careful as you. LifeLock makes it easy to take control of your identity and will work to fix identity theft if it happens. Join the millions of Americans who trust LifeLock. Visit LifeLock.com slash metal today to save up to 40% off your first year.

So I have some big news for vegans and vegetarians everywhere. It's Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Made for people with a plant-based diet or anyone really who wants to enjoy the great taste of Hellman's real without the eggs. Hellman's plant-based is perfect for sandwiches, salads, veggie burgers, or any of your family favorites.

To celebrate, Hellman's is sharing some easy, delicious plant-based recipes at hellmans.com. Hellman's Plant-Based Mayo Spread and Dressing. Same great taste, plant-based.

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