Characterizing mobility and contact networks in virtual worlds

Abstract

Virtual worlds have recently gained wide recognition as an important field of study in Computer Science. In this work we present an analysis of the mobility and interactions among characters in World of Warcraft (WoW) and Second Life based on the contact opportunities extracted from actual user data in each of those domains. We analyze character contacts in terms of their spatial and temporal characteristics, as well as the social network derived from such contacts. Our results show that the contacts observed may be more influenced by the nature of the interactions and goals of the users in each situation than by the intrinsic structure of such worlds. In particular, observations from a city in WoW are closer to those of Second Life than to other areas in WoW itself.© Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2010.