Liquid Journal of Complex Systems

Article #2, version 9 March 2012, state: Liquid turbulent

A Success Story in the Science of Complex Systems: Social Dynamics in a Large-Scale On-Line Game

Authors: Michael Szell and Stefan Thurner

Abstract

This success story describes the experiments lead by Michael Szell and Stefan Thurner on a dataset concerning the relations between over 300,000 human players of a massive multiplayer online game. All actions of all players over three years were recorded, including the establishment of social ties in friend-, enemy- and communication networks. Based on the observation of these networks, Szell and Thurner propose two new empirical social laws and provide strong quantitative evidence for classical social balance assumptions: the weak ties hypothesis and triadic closure. The analysis of negative social ties allowed identifying two classes of enemy formation processes. These experiments illustrate the new challenge faced by Complex Systems Science: dealing with big amounts of data that became accessible by the recent developments in IT. This new data-driven approach allows to study human behaviour and interactions through the exploitation of social models, discussing systemic properties of human groups and societies.

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Bibliography

S. Thurner, M. Szell, and R. Sinatra, "Emergence of Good Conduct, Scaling and Zipf Laws in Human Behavioral Sequences in an Online World", PLoS ONE 7, e29796, (2012)

Received: 9 March 2012 | Updated: 9 March 2012 | Liquid turbulent since: 9 March 2012

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