Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier

Castronova, Edward

doi:10.2139/ssrn.294828

Cited by 153 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Although all goods produced and traded are virtual, the economy as such is real: players invest time and effort to invent, produce, distribute, consume and dispose these virtual goods and services. Virtual goods produced in some MMOGs can be traded in the real world for real money, which then allows to measure hourly wage and gross national product of a MMOG [39]. In some MMOGs, entire characters (avatars) are traded for money in the real world, which allows to quantify 'human capital' , such as skills, influence on others, leadership, etc.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral and Network Origins of Wealth Inequality: Insights from a Virtual World

Fuchs

Thurner

2014

PLoS ONE

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Almost universally, wealth is not distributed uniformly within societies or economies. Even though wealth data have been collected in various forms for centuries, the origins for the observed wealth-disparity and social inequality are not yet fully understood. Especially the impact and connections of human behavior on wealth could so far not be inferred from data. Here we study wealth data from the virtual economy of the massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) Pardus. This data not only contains every player's wealth at every point in time, but also all actions over a timespan of almost a decade. We find that wealth distributions in the virtual world are very similar to those in Western countries. In particular we find an approximate exponential distribution for low wealth levels and a power-law tail for high levels. The Gini index is found to be , which is close to the indices of many Western countries. We find that wealth-increase rates depend on the time when players entered the game. Players that entered the game early on tend to have remarkably higher wealth-increase rates than those who joined later. Studying the players' positions within their social networks, we find that the local position in the trade network is most relevant for wealth. Wealthy people have high in- and out-degrees in the trade network, relatively low nearest-neighbor degrees, and low clustering coefficients. Wealthy players have many mutual friendships and are socially well respected by others, but spend more time on business than on socializing. Wealthy players have few personal enemies, but show animosity towards players that behave as public enemies. We find that players that are not organized within social groups are significantly poorer on average. We observe that “political” status and wealth go hand in hand.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral and Network Origins of Wealth Inequality: Insights from a Virtual World

Fuchs

Thurner

2014

PLoS ONE

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“…For instance, we can design a kind of virus in a virtual world and let it spread to investigate its epidemics, we can design some economic games in a virtual world to study the formation of human cooperation (indeed, numerical experiments have been done [2]), and we can record the economic behaviors of avatars to understand the evolution of wealth distribution. A pioneering work was done by Edward Castronova, who traveled in a virtual world called "Norrath" and performed preliminary analysis of its economy [3]. Recently, there are also efforts in the field of computational social sciences from a complex network perspective [4,5,6,7,8,9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistical properties of online avatar numbers in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game

Jiang

Ren

et al. 2010

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications

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“…Interestingly, one of the similarities between the MMORPG ecosystem and the real world is malicious activity. Similar to criminals or offenders in a society, there have existed malicious characters in MMORPG called game bots (Castronova, 2001). A game bot is an automated program that makes the character move around the virtual world as specified and performs predefined actions to collect game assets (Kang et al, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understand Watchdogs: Discover How Game Bot Get Discovered

Park¹,

Kim²

2020

Preprint

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The game industry has long been troubled by malicious activities utilizing game bots. The game bots disturb other game players and destroy the environmental system of the games. For these reasons, the game industry put their best efforts to detect the game bots among players' characters using the learning-based detections. However, one problem with the detection methodologies is that they do not provide rational explanations about their decisions. To resolve this problem, in this work, we investigate the explainabilities of the game bot detection. We develop the XAI model using a dataset from the Korean MMORPG, AION, which includes game logs of human players and game bots. More than one classification model has been applied to the dataset to be analyzed by applying interpretable models. This provides us explanations about the game bots' behavior, and the truthfulness of the explanations has been evaluated. Besides, interpretability contributes to minimizing false detection, which imposes unfair restrictions on human players.

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Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier

Cited by 153 publications

References 4 publications

Behavioral and Network Origins of Wealth Inequality: Insights from a Virtual World

Behavioral and Network Origins of Wealth Inequality: Insights from a Virtual World

Statistical properties of online avatar numbers in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game

Understand Watchdogs: Discover How Game Bot Get Discovered

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