Mobility in an online world: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 05:32, 23 June 2010

CSSS Santa Fe 2010

Team

Michael Szell, Giovanni Petri, Kang Zhao, Drew Levin

Intro

Massive multiplayer online games (MMOG) provide a fascinating new way of observing hundreds of thousands of simultaneously socially interacting individuals engaged in virtual economic activities. We have compiled a (fully anonymized!) data set consisting of practically all actions of all players over a period of three years from the MMOG Pardus (www.pardus.at) played by over 300,000 people. Here we focus on the movement of players in the game's virtual universe, to shed light on mobility patterns within human societies.

A Pardus universe consists of 400 sectors, where each sector is a rectangular grid made up of 15x15 fields on average. A field is the atomic unit of space on which players move. Each sector has a unique sector-id, each field has a unique field-id, with a corresponding a sector-id. To players, sectors are displayed as nodes on a two-dimensional cartesian coordinate system, the universe map. Nearby sectors -- in the sense of having small distance in the universe map -- may be interconnected by wormhole-links, allowing plyers to hop from sector to sector. While wormhole links always link together exactly two wormholes (i.e. two sectors), so-called X-holes connect to all other X-holes in the universe. This results in a ``folding of space, with X-holes bringing closer far apart sectors. Players have a movement cost for traveling fields and for jumping through wormholes and X-holes, limiting their possible numbers of daily traveled fields and sectors.

Tasks

Extract data of universe
Bring topology data in network format (adjacency list / sparse matrix)
Visualize network, e.g. in PAJEK, G-PHI
Extract mobility data of players
Bring them in reasonable format (time-series). E.g. Time-series of daily hops.
Analyze data
Visualize time-evolving data (over the whole time-span: 1. display locations of 5 typical player, 2. display locations of 100 players in war)
Formulate research questions
Find literature on mobility, etc.
Write paper (tex)

Data -> Calculations/Measures

Time-series of distances travelled (over a time-span) -> Spatial entropy, COV matrix
Number of unique places visited (over a time-span)
Time-series of changed friends/enemies -> Social entropy

Research Questions

How is spatial/social entropy distributed? Do we see modes? If so, why?
Does mobility change in times of war?
Do locations and friends/enemies correlate? If so, is there causality?
...

Meetings

Thursday, June 10, 5 PM, lecture room
Sunday, June 13, 8:30 PM, cafeteria
Sunday, June 20, whole day, cafeteria
Tuesday, June 22, 5 PM, cafeteria

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 ==Intro==
 [[Image:Pardus_universe.png|thumb|right|352px|Universe]]
-The topology of this online world can be expressed as a network, where sectors are nodes (placed on a cartesian grid) and wormholes are links between nearby sectors. A second type of link, the X-hole, links distant sectors, thus giving the universe a small-world property. Players live and move in this environment. For a fixed time for each day and each of the 10^4-10^5 players, we know their locations. (All data is fully anonymized!)
+Massive multiplayer online games (MMOG) provide a fascinating new way of observing hundreds of thousands of simultaneously socially interacting individuals engaged in virtual economic activities. We have compiled a (fully anonymized!) data set consisting of practically all actions of all players over a period of three years from the MMOG Pardus (www.pardus.at) played by over 300,000 people. Here we focus on the movement of players in the game's virtual universe, to shed light on mobility patterns within human societies.
+A Pardus universe consists of 400 sectors, where each sector is a rectangular grid made up of 15x15 fields on average. A field is the atomic unit of space on which players move. Each sector has a unique sector-id, each field has a unique field-id, with a corresponding a sector-id. To players, sectors are displayed as nodes on a two-dimensional cartesian coordinate system, the universe map. Nearby sectors -- in the sense of having small distance in the universe map -- may be interconnected by wormhole-links, allowing plyers to hop from sector to sector. While wormhole links always link together exactly two wormholes (i.e. two sectors), so-called X-holes connect to all other X-holes in the universe. This results in a ``folding'' of space, with X-holes bringing closer far apart sectors. Players have a movement cost for traveling fields and for jumping through wormholes and X-holes, limiting their possible numbers of daily traveled fields and sectors.