Online-offline activities and game-playing behaviors of avatars in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game

Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are very popular in China, which provides a potential platform for scientific research. We study the online-offline activities of avatars in an MMORPG to understand their game-playing behavior. The statistical analysis unveils that the active avatars can be classified into three types. The avatars of the first type are owned by game cheaters who go online and offline in preset time intervals with the online duration distributions dominated by pulses. The second type of avatars is characterized by a Weibull distribution in the online durations, which is confirmed by statistical tests. The distributions of online durations of the remaining individual avatars differ from the above two types and cannot be described by a simple form. These findings have potential applications in the game industry. Introduction. – According to the Statistical Reports on the Internet Development in China released by China Internet Network Information Center, the past twelve years have witnessed a sharp increase in the number of Chinese netizens from 0.63 million on 31 October 1997 to 338 million on 16 July 2009. Till June 2009, the size of netizens playing massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) is 78.55 million. The MMOGs in mainland China include two types, i.e., the massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and the large-scale casual game, both having about 49 million users. An MMOG is an online virtual world, where avatars can live and interact with one another in a somewhat realistic manner. The huge number of users in MMOGs has raised many open academic problems and attracted vast interest of academics from diverse angles of view, especially since the pioneering work done by Edward Castronova, who traveled in a virtual world called “Norrath” and performed a preliminary analysis of its economy [1]. Particularly, virtual worlds have great potential for research in social, behav(a)e-mail: [email protected] ioral, and economic sciences [2]. The outbreak of SARS virus in 2003 and the recent globally spread swine flu forces scientists to understand the epidemics of infectious diseases. A lot of epidemic models have been proposed [3]. Although there are several exceptions [4, 5], the limited availability of empirical data of human mobility remains a crucial challenge [6]. To partly overcome this difficulty, we can design a kind of virus in a virtual world and let it spread to investigate its epidemics. For other applications, we can design some economic games in a virtual world to study the formation of human cooperation (indeed, numerical experiments have been done [7]), and we can record the economic behaviors of avatars to understand the evolution of wealth distribution. There are also efforts in the field of computational social sciences from a complex network perspective [8–13]. In addition to its scientific potentials, virtual worlds could act as nice places for real social activities, such as marketing [14–16], and provide opportunities for players to make real money [17]. In this Letter, we investigate the online-offline activities and game-playing behaviors of the avatars inhabiting