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Analyzing Effects of Public Communication onto Player Behavior in Massively Multiplayer Online Games

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Predicting Real World Behaviors from Virtual World Data

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Complexity ((SPCOM))

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Abstract

In this preliminary work, we study how public forum communication reflects and shapes virtual world behavior. We find that in-game groups have differential public posting habits; that player behavior is reflected in public communication (in particular, players who attack more are mentioned more in the public forums), and finally that public and personal communications are linked, those who speak together publicly also speak together privately.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For instance, World of Warcraft offers a forum at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/.

  2. 2.

    For instance, in the data set we investigate below, public forums were viewed more than 5 million times, even though the number of poster was a tiny fraction of the people who actually played.

  3. 3.

    To preserve the confidentiality of the game, we have anonymized some of the terms describing the game. No descriptions of gameplay dynamics have been changed.

  4. 4.

    Rankit is the Rank Inverse Log Transformation function: \(f(x) = \Phi^{-1}((x_{r}-.5)/n)\), where x r is the rank of x and \(\Phi^{-1}\) is the inverse normal cumulative distribution function.

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Acknowledgments

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the US Department of Energys National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Kiran Lakkaraju, Jeremy Bernstein & Jon Whetzel

Authors
  1. Kiran Lakkaraju
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  2. Jeremy Bernstein
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  3. Jon Whetzel
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kiran Lakkaraju .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

    Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

  2. Emerging Media & Communication Program School of Arts & Humanities, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas, USA

    Cuihua Shen

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

    Jaideep Srivastava

  4. Dept. of Communication Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA

    Noshir Contractor

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Lakkaraju, K., Bernstein, J., Whetzel, J. (2014). Analyzing Effects of Public Communication onto Player Behavior in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. In: Ahmad, M., Shen, C., Srivastava, J., Contractor, N. (eds) Predicting Real World Behaviors from Virtual World Data. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07142-8_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07142-8_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07141-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07142-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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