![]() The difference is more prominent for players who prefer to operate in in-game social groups. Through interactions in the game, players develop different feelings and generally experience less loneliness and social anxiety compared to those feelings in the real-world. Martoncik observed that WoW players were on average more social in the game than in the real-world. World of Warcraft (WoW) provides a popular virtual (online) world in a fantasy setting where players can either fight each other or collaborate to meet the game’s preset challenges. We now provide some examples of how social and economic actions in virtual worlds can be used to study socioeconomic phenomena. Examples include the use of online posts and mobile communications to infer individual economic status, and inferring socioeconomic status from large-scale online data sources. In a related content many other works have addressed the issue whether digital data can be exploited to assess specific socioeconomic phenomena. A major question, however, is whether the data extracted from virtual worlds are representative enough to study real-world socioeconomic phenomena and whether they capture real-world human behaviour. ![]() Data extracted from virtual worlds allow researchers to test theories on human behaviour in highly controlled environments, for example, sociological behaviour, human mobility, international relations and economic models. The last two decades has seen the rise of scientific studies of virtual worlds and their potential connection to the real-world. Virtual worlds are computer-simulated games where real-world people or players can create avatars to live, interact and communicate among themselves or with the virtual environment within a particular context or theme. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. For further requests please contact KS ( Authors may also request these data directly from Crowd Control Productions ( The data for the real-world social and economic activities (such as the Global Terrorist Index, the Global Peace Index, the Consumer Price Index, the Real Effective Exchange Rate, the Unemployment Rate) used in the presented analysis are publicly available and references are given in the text.įunding: This research was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Flanders) under Grant Number G018115N and G015617N, and by the Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds from Ghent University under Grant Number BOF2452014000402. We have a contract with Crowd Control Productions that grants us access to the data for non-commercial scientific research. The data sets for the in-game activities of the players of EVE online belong to Crowd Control Productions (URL: ). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data for the country profiles are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Received: Accepted: SeptemPublished: October 21, 2020Ĭopyright: © 2020 Belaza et al. Overall, we find evidence that the real-world environment affects in-game behaviour, suggesting that virtual worlds can be used to experiment and test social and economic theories, and to infer real-world behaviour at the country level.Ĭitation: Belaza AM, Ryckebusch J, Schoors K, Rocha LEC, Vandermarliere B (2020) On the connection between real-world circumstances and online player behaviour: The case of EVE Online. The unemployment rate and exchange rate make players trade more efficiently and cautiously in-game. In-game trading behaviour is dependent on the macro-economic environment where players live. The ability to make in-game friends is also positively related to real-world levels of aggressiveness in much the same way. The opposite is true for in-game aggressiveness towards other players, which seems to work as a safety valve for real-world player aggressiveness. We find that in-game aggressiveness to non-player characters is positively related to real-world levels of aggressiveness as measured by the Global Peace Index and the Global Terrorist Index at the country level. Using data from EVE Online, a massive online multi-player game simulating a fantasy galaxy, we analyse the relation between the real-world context in which players live and their in-game behaviour at the country level. Virtual worlds involving social and economic interactions are particularly useful to test social and economic theories. ![]() The online environment facilitates that players from different countries interact in a common virtual world. Games involving virtual worlds are popular in several segments of the population and societies. ![]()
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