Experimental study of the structure of a social network and human dynamics in a virtual society
We study a large social network consisting of 3 x 104 individuals, who interact in a large virtual world of Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games ( MMORPGs). On the basis of the players' list of friends and the playing time received from the on-line game server, we investigate the structure of the network and human dynamics. We try to show that the structure of this friendship network is very similar to the structure of different social networks. In order to investigate the relation between networks of acquaintances in virtual and real worlds, we carried out a survey among the players. We found very interesting scaling laws concerning human dynamics. Our research has shown how long people are interested in a single task, and how much time they devote to it. It is surprising that exponent values in both cases are close to minus one.
human dynamics complex system complex networks power law distributions