Developing an MMOG as a Data Source and Platform for Social Experimentation and Simulation

The rise of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and virtual worlds has made it possible to record and examine group and individual interactions in discrete, quantifiable ways. [4] Researchers have studied the ethnographic makeup of these game communities, the social interactions between players, and the analogs between these and extra-game social behaviors. [3, 6] Researchers have studied the ethnographic makeup of these game communities, the social interactions between players, and the analogs between these and extra-game social behaviors. [3, 6 This work has garnered information about player habits from a variety of sources: in-game observation, interviews, surveys, in-game experiments, data from game publishers, and scripts that scrape data from the game worlds. [4,6,8] In this paper, we discuss an alternate and flexible approach to this issue, reviewing the impetus for, design, and applications of an MMOG being developed as a platfor