It's also somewhat monumental. Williams and his colleagues are the first research group to conduct a large-scale study of MMOs with the cooperation of a game publisher. Their partner is Sony Online Entertainment, which has helped in a very significant way -- it's handed over 60TB of EverQuest II server data to Williams and his group, the statistical output of the actions of hundreds of thousands of players across several years. Included in that Gordian knot of data is everything that happened in EverQuest II during that span of time, and Williams and his partners have been at work teasing a great many truths out of it. Thinking about what the work must be like makes me feel a bit sorry for their research assistants. A brief digression: One summer when I was in school, I helped a grad student friend comb through Depression-era census records for the occurrences of something very specific. I can only imagine what that task is like if the material is written in machine language.
Furthermore, privacy safeguards in place prevent the researchers from getting at some of the info directly. For instance, the server logs will state that Player X (identified by an anonymized string of numbers, not an account name or anything) communicated with (or, I'm inferring, attacked, grouped, or traded with) Player Y. But it won't reveal the contents of the chat logs. So no, Williams and company are not peeking into your cybersex life. They've actually had to get creative in order to map some of the more salient connections between people and their actions as recorded by the servers.
"I contain multitudes."
To supplement the data from the logs for a specific study (titled "Who plays, how much, and why? Debunking the stereotypical gamer profile", published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication last September), they conducted an opt-in survey with SOE's help. They offered an in-game item to participants, which resulted, naturally, in mad participants. Early as this examination of the contents of the 60TB monolith was, it challenged quite a few of the myths and stereotypes that we associate with MMO players.
Most significant, at least in my opinion: The average EQ2 player is 31 years old. Not a pasty teen, nor a college student squandering his salad years. Emphasis on the "he": around 81 percent of players are male. The female 19 percent, however, play a little bit more than their male counterparts: about 29 hours per week, versus 25. A little less surprising, given the level of disposable time and money that an affinity for MMOs would imply, is that EQ2 players tend to be richer than the national average, with a household income of $84,715 per year, compared to $58,526 for the general population. Conversely, quite a bit surprising given some of the puerile humor we MMO players are the target of (not to mention subject one another to), is that we may not be quite as fat as the rest of America. Adult EQ2 players who participated in the poll reported an average body-mass index (BMI) of 25.19, versus the American adult average of 28. Is this evidence that EQ2 players are super-setting Wii Fit sessions in between mob pulls?
Maybe not. Anyway, that's my scratching of the surface. From talking to Williams, I get the impression that he and his co-researchers are themselves only just starting to get acquainted with the data. Interesting stuff, though, no?
[Originally from Miami, FL, Miguel was raised on an intellectual diet of borrowed Nintendo tapes, pilfered D&D books, and pre-pewter metal miniatures. He plays MMOs for all the wrong reasons, and games like Half-Life 2 for all the right ones. In his column, expect him to poorly justify the former, and manage to grasp at straws regarding the latter. If you want to experience his NSFW links, follow him on Twitter.]
