Large-scale study of MMO player interactions via data mining.

We've all seen the threads started by researchers on these forums asking questions, or directing us to surveys. They’ve wanted to know everything from details about your character’s appearance and race, questions about who you interact with, to uncomfortable probing queries about how your social life is supposedly failing because of your online gaming habits. So what if they didn’t have to ask?

This is just the case in a recently published article (http://www.pnas.org/content/107/31/13636.full.pdf+html) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The study involved the space-age browser based MMO Pardus (http://www.pardus.at/), and dove deeper into the interactions between players than previous studies, by recording a number of different player interactions.

So what did the researchers find with all this data-mining? Honestly, very little that was surprising. To use the authors' words "Positive links are highly reciprocal, negative links are not."

People are going to trade more with people they PM (whisper / Private Message); they are more likely to be friends with people they chat with, and they aren't likely to attack people they interact with frequently. Not only that, but these correlations got stronger over time, with people being increasingly less likely to betray their allies the longer they played together.

On the other hand, people who attacked others didn't often become mutual enemies. Apparently this is because ganking is just as big a problem in Pardus as it is in WoW. People preferred to only attack players who appeared much weaker than them; in the words of the authors "a strong player is more likely to attack a weaker player to secure a win." Fair fights, apparently, were exceedingly rare.

So does this mean the end of those questionnaires? That much is far from certain. The results of all the data mining didn’t really yield that much surprising; though it did allow the scientists to quantify the interactions, which is always a plus from a scientific point of view. Of course this kind of probing inquiry is likely enough to make the more squeamish among us yearn for the days of annoying questions threads.

- someproteinguy