A Social Network Analysis of a Massively Multi-player On-Line Role Playing Game

Abstract

An instance of a massively on-line role playing game called The Mana World is analyzed for its social networks. The gathered data is the result of the first phase of the ModelMMORPG project in which players played a specially designed quest during a controlled experiment. Observations based on the monitored virtual community behaviour and individual elements of interaction are visualised herein and analysed using social network analysis. Insight into the dynamics of the studied virtual society is given along with observations regarding structure of groups and individuals alike. Keywords-virtual community, MMORPG, social network analysis I. INTRODUCTIONThe ModelMMORPG (Large-Scale Multi-Agent Modeling of Massively On-Line Role-Playing Games) project 1 employs a combined empirical and theoretical approach towards finding organizational patterns in gaming behaviour of both humans and artificial agents. From the empirical side, the project studies the human behavior on a number of venues across various gaming servers in order to find most suitable organizational patterns employed by most successful player communities. From the theoretical side, a multitude of organizational architectures from organization theory in various massively multi-player on-line role playing game (MMORPG) settings is tested, and compared with methods found in empirical research. The project is aimed towards enriching the organizational design methods for the development of MMORPGs and to understand the underlying principles of self-organizing and adaptable networks of large-scale multi-agent systems.According to Wikipedia massively multi-player on-line game (MMOG) is a (computer) game that supports a great number of players playing on-line simultaneously causing or even fostering interaction among them. Role-playing games (RPGs) are a genre in which the player controls the actions of some protagonist (or potentially several party members) in a world which is well defined. MMORPGs are thus a mixture of these two genres allowing players to control the action of their protagonist (avatar) by interacting with a potentially large user-base on-line.MMORPGs have a number of different subgenres, but a usual setting is that a protagonist is placed into a world in which he interacts with various NPCs (Non-Playing Characters) and mobs which give out tasks (quests) that it has to solve to be able to buy better equipment, learn new skills like magic and similar, or proceed to higher levels. In ModelMMORPG we have chosen The Mana World (TMW) 2 MMORPG to conduct our research. The reasons for selection were: (a) it is open source (GPL licensed) allowing us to modify code and add additional functionality, (b) it has a supportive community, (c) it supports a number of interaction techniques which can be studied (e.g. trade among players, IRC based chat, organizing teams called parties, social network functions e.g. friends, enemies, parties etc.), (d) it is a (more or less) finished game featuring lots of quests that can be analyzed.In ModelMMORPG, we have des...