This error — in Call of Duty: World at War — is a well-known crash often tied to memory issues, corrupt config files, or certain modded maps (especially custom zombie maps).
Since you mentioned "interesting paper," I suspect you might have seen this error referenced in a technical write-up, forensic analysis, or game reversing paper — possibly discussing how the game’s error handling works or how to exploit/crash it. cod waw unhandled exception caught