Today, researchers at the University of Minnesota revealed findings showing that online game communities are large enough to resemble traditional communities in many ways now. WOW Gold Kaufen The findings are being used in social science to study human behavior using games like EverQuest 2.
The research was collected over the span of three years of data and weighs in at over 60 terabytes. The study tracked the behavior of the roughly 300,000 EverQuest 2 players that average 26 hours per week playing the game.
During the study, the researchers were able to model social and behavioral dynamics of individuals, groups, and networks within the EverQuest 2 community. The results were recently presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) during a 90-minute symposium titled "Analyzing Virtual Worlds: Next Step in the Evolution of Social Science Research."
