I have referenced the EQ2 data dump to Dmitri Williams & team before, something that I helped kick off way back when and which has been supported by SOE in an ongoing fashion. Now there’s an article at Ars Technica which describes yet more findings, apparently from a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Jaideep Srivastava is a computer scientist doing work on machine learning and data mining—in the past, he has studied shopping cart abandonment at Amazon.com, a virtual event without a real-world parallel. He spent a little time talking about the challenges of working with the Everquest II dataset, which on its own doesn’t lend itself to processing by common algorithms. For some studies, he has imported the data into a specialized database, one with a large and complex structure. Regardless of format, many one-pass, exhaustive algorithms simply choke on a dataset this large, which is forcing his group to use some incremental analysis methods or to work with subsets of the data.

They got the first data dump around when I left SOE, so that should give you an idea of how big the dataset is, that it took this long to analyze!

Some bullet points:

• “Gender turned out to be a negative influence on interactions: even after their low numbers were taken into account, female players avoided interacting with each other.”
• “Time zones had some influence; players in the same time zone were 1.25 times more likely to partner than players even one time zone apart.”
• “players within 10 kilometers of each other were five times more likely to interact. Contractor concluded that, for the typical player, the game simply offered a way of continuing their real-world social interactions in a virtual setting.”
• “The average age of players turned out to be 31.”
• “their body mass index was better than the US average and, although they were slightly more depressed than average, they were also less anxious.”
• “a small subset of the population—about five percent—who used the game for serious role playing and, according to Williams, “They are psychologically much worse off than the regular players.” They belong to marginalized groups, like ethnic and religious minorities and non-heterosexuals, and tended to use the game as a coping mechanism.”
• “Older women turned out to be some of the most committed players but significantly under-reported the amount of time they spent in the game by three hours per week (men under-reported as well, but only by one hour).”