TY - GEN
T1 - Unveiling a socio-economic system in a virtual world
T2 - 27th International World Wide Web, WWW 2018
AU - Chun, Selin
AU - Choi, Deajin
AU - Han, Jinyoung
AU - Kim, Huy Kang
AU - Kwon, Taekyoung
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by ‘The Cross-Ministry Giga KOREA Project’ grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No.GK17S0400, Research and Development of Open 5G Reference Model) and the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-2017-N). The ICT at Seoul National University provided research facilities for this study.
Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by 'The Cross-Ministry Giga KOREA Project' grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No.GK17S0400, Research and Development of Open 5G Reference Model) and the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-2017-N). The ICT at Seoul National University provided research facilities for this study.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License.
PY - 2018/4/10
Y1 - 2018/4/10
N2 - Understanding socio-economic systems in MMORPGs can provide an important implication on how people participate in the economy and how people interact with each other. In this paper, we model the socio-economic system of an Aion, a popular MMORPG, as a multi-layer graph. Using the dataset consisting of 94,870 users and their activity records spanning three months, we examine how economic activities are associated with social interactions, and find that social interactions like participating in a party or exchanging messages are highly correlated with the trade activities. We also find that virtual economy in Aion is heavily inclined to a small number of upper-class userswho play a crucial role in virtual economy. Our analysis on the upper-class users reveals that a significant portion of them reach at the max-level and tend to either (i) have many social interactions with others or (ii) play extremely much time with no social activity. We also reveal that there are some low-level upper-class users who gain much money but hardly socialize with others. Lastly, we show how upper-class users who are at low-levels, play the game extremely much more than others, or rarely interact with other users, are associated with the Real Money Trade (RMT), which may be an illegal behavior that gathers in-game money for exchanging into real-world money. We reveal that more than half of total money exchanged through the trade are associated with the upper-class users who involve in the RMT.
AB - Understanding socio-economic systems in MMORPGs can provide an important implication on how people participate in the economy and how people interact with each other. In this paper, we model the socio-economic system of an Aion, a popular MMORPG, as a multi-layer graph. Using the dataset consisting of 94,870 users and their activity records spanning three months, we examine how economic activities are associated with social interactions, and find that social interactions like participating in a party or exchanging messages are highly correlated with the trade activities. We also find that virtual economy in Aion is heavily inclined to a small number of upper-class userswho play a crucial role in virtual economy. Our analysis on the upper-class users reveals that a significant portion of them reach at the max-level and tend to either (i) have many social interactions with others or (ii) play extremely much time with no social activity. We also reveal that there are some low-level upper-class users who gain much money but hardly socialize with others. Lastly, we show how upper-class users who are at low-levels, play the game extremely much more than others, or rarely interact with other users, are associated with the Real Money Trade (RMT), which may be an illegal behavior that gathers in-game money for exchanging into real-world money. We reveal that more than half of total money exchanged through the trade are associated with the upper-class users who involve in the RMT.
KW - Aion
KW - Mmorpg
KW - Real money trade
KW - Socio-economic analysis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85061079663&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3178876.3186173
DO - 10.1145/3178876.3186173
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85061079663
T3 - The Web Conference 2018 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2018
SP - 1929
EP - 1938
BT - The Web Conference 2018 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2018
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 23 April 2018 through 27 April 2018
ER -