The players of EverQuest 2 might be pleased to learn that their gameplay may further science. They may be less enthused, however, to learn that a complete record of their interactions with one another is being studied by researchers. Following a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ars technica's John Timmer reports, "With the cooperation of Sony, a collaborative group of academic researchers at a number of institutions have obtained the complete server logs from the company's EverQuest 2 MMORPG." That's right. This is everything you've ever done in the game, but it's all in the name of science.
The researchers are among those who believe that massively multiplayer online games can be used to model real world collective behavior. The task ahead of them is a daunting one, with close to 60 TB of data to pore over. "The end result is a log that included four years of data for over 400,000 players that took part in the game, which was followed up with demographic surveys of the users. All told, it makes for a massive data set with distinct challenges but plenty of opportunities," Timmer writes.
Also notable is how cooperation of this nature between a game developer and the academic community could provide some tangible benefits for both parties. Timmer writes, "There was also talk about the potential for a symbiotic relationship between game designers and researchers. [Researcher] Srivastava's work on customer churn, for example, could prove highly valuable for developers that rely on retaining subscribers, and many of the studies that the speakers were interested in doing could provide valuable feedback on how users were actually interacting with various features of the game."
As interesting as this undertaking is, it does perhaps raise some privacy concerns. Have a look at Timmer's article at ars technica for a much more detailed write up of academia's interest in EverQuest 2, and let us know -- how do you feel about this newfound partnership between Sony and the academic community?
