Title :
Analyzing the Evolution of Social Groups in World of Warcraft®
Author :
Thurau, Christian ; Bauckhage, Christian
Author_Institution :
Visual & Social Media Group, Fraunhofer IAIS, St. Augustin, Germany
Abstract :
This paper investigates the evolution of social structures in the game WORLD OF WARCRAFT®. We analyze 192 million recordings of 18 million characters belonging to 1.4 million teams, spanning a period of 4 years. Using a recent matrix factorization method, we extract lower dimensional data embeddings. The embeddings provide intuitively interpretable categorizations and we find a tendency towards guilds comprised of casual gamers. To our knowledge, this is the first study considering such a vast amount of data for analyzing groups in MMORPGs.
Keywords :
Internet; computer games; information retrieval; matrix decomposition; social networking (online); World of Warcraft® game; intuitively interpretable categorization; lower dimensional data extraction; massively multiplayer online role playing game; matrix factorization method; social group; Ear;
Conference_Titel :
Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG), 2010 IEEE Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Dublin
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-6295-7
Electronic_ISBN :
978-1-4244-6296-4
DOI :
10.1109/ITW.2010.5593358
