Online gamers keep it local, says new study

Kristin Kalning Games editor • E-mail

Massively multiplayer games can be a global melting pot. Hop into “World of Warcraft” or “Guild Wars” and your North American warrior can rub shoulders with an Australian healer.

But more often than not, online gamers are more apt to hang out with people in their neighborhoods than people on the next continent, says a new study. The analysis, which tracked the playing habits of 7,000 people in Sony Online’s “EveryQuest II,” says gamers game with people they know: friends, friends of friends and family.

That’s not to say that people don’t meet new folks playing “EverQuest II,” says Dmitri Williams, one of the study’s investigators. But the research shows that the Internet — and online games — are used mostly as a way to stay in touch with friends and family.

“These aren’t necessarily the new weirdos, these are the weirdos that you already knew,” says Williams, who is an assistant professor of communications at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School.

It is true that online-game players tend to connect to nearby servers, which results in faster gameplay. But unlike “World of Warcraft,” which has tons of servers to accommodate its 11.5 million monthly subscribers, Sony Online has a couple dozen English-speaking servers and five foreign-language servers for “EQII.” So it’s less likely that players would find themselves randomly playing someone down the street, just because of server distribution. These players, says Williams, are taking their offline relationships online.

To administer the study Williams and three other investigators studied server logs from the game, which were provided by Sony Online.

The logs were divided into three categories: action (what players did and made), interaction (who players interacted with) and transaction (what they bought and sold). The team could tell who was going on quests with whom, who players grouped with, who was fighting what monster.

The National Science Foundation and the Army Research Institute funded the study, but Sony Online gave the research team access to the logs because it was interested in the study’s findings as a way to better understand their players, says company spokesperson Courtney Simmons.

Nothing personal
But Simmons stresses that Sony Online didn’t want to know too much — or let the researchers get too personal. The team didn’t have access to players’ names or any personal information, says Noshir Contractor, another one of the study’s investigators and a social sciences professor at Northwestern University. All the data was made anonymous.

Sony gave the research team the ability to link a survey in the game and an optional battery of questions that asked players how much they played, who they played with, levels of depression and even sexual preferences.

Again, the responses were anonymous, but the team was able to map the 7,000 survey respondents with their actual activity within the game without knowing who the people were.

Players underestimate play time
One finding that isn’t terribly shocking: Players tended to underestimate how much they play. But women significantly lowballed their guesses: Women self-reported, on average, 26 hours of weekly play and their actual average play time was 29 hours. Men, by contrast, were off by only an hour.

Williams says that while there are more men playing than women, women are the hardcore players. “That, to me, was a definite myth buster,” he says. “And then the other weird finding, that the players were healthy.”

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