Researchers mine Second Life interaction logs to track trends
by Tateru Nino 
Jul 3rd 2009 at 8:00PM
Filed under: Culture, News items, Second Life, Academic, Virtual worlds
While most actions people take in the flesh are ephemeral – performed fleetingly, and unmarked – MMOGs and virtual environments keep that data as a rule, usually most or all of it.
Three social researchers from the University of Michigan obtained data from Linden Lab about the possession and acquisition of 'gestures' (preprogrammed sequences of text, avatar animations and/or audio) and data about account creation dates and friends-lists, and studied how gestures passed from user to user.
The data provided by Linden Lab did not contain any specific identifying information about individual accounts, but the set of information and interactions is quite detailed.
The resulting paper, Social Influence and the Diffusion of User-Created Content (PDF), provides a fascinating look into human trend and fad behavior. Information for this sort of analysis has rarely been available in the past, and even then usually only under some quite unnatural conditions.
The data itself yields functional models of adoption which appear to be far more detailed than the generally flawed notions of 'viral' spread. It will be interesting to see if more researchers avail themselves of the opportunity to analyze this data as virtual environments continue to be more broadly used.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jacek Antonelli said on 10:09PM 7-03-2009
It's pretty cool that LL is willing to provide data for research (as long as the data isn't personally identifying, of course).
I'm just disappointed the researchers didn't take the opportunity to coin "the 'Hoooooo!' phenomenon" as a serious academic term. Oh well, maybe next time.
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TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 3:17AM 7-04-2009
I find it a kinda disturbing that LL keeps that kind of data about us (I was already aware of that practice before this article)
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Jacek Antonelli said on 6:32PM 7-04-2009
Well, most if not all of the data necessary for this study could come from the transaction history and friends list, which we all know LL stores. The data would still be useful with the names changed to "Avatar #13841", etc.
Of course, there's lots of other data that LL tracks about us, some of it disturbingly personal, but there's no reason to think they'd go sharing that around without making it non-personally-identifying.
BaronJuJu said on 4:40AM 7-04-2009
Funny, SL does this and it almost praised for its look into MMO gamers habits. SOE did this about a year ago and was raked over the coals by the anti-SOE brigade for loss of privacy and monitoring our lives fear mongering.
I'm glad to see universities are looking outside of the box when studying human behaviors. I'm sure we will see more studies like this in the years to come.
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Dale Innis said on 11:10AM 7-04-2009
Cool beans! It is sort of scary how the Lab knows every move we make, but of course they do, so probably better we not forget the fact.
I'm amused that they used gestures in particular in their study; I wonder if they know the extent to which that selects a subset of SL users. I hardly use gestures at all, myself, and can't remember the last time I gave one to someone, and when people give them to me I say thanks and then lose them in inventory forever.
Would be interesting to compare gesture-giving patterns with those for, say, animations, notecards, prim-objects...
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TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 10:42AM 7-06-2009
I think it would also be interesting if the study included data about the usage of the gestures, including the percentage of people that use the gesture they receive, and the percentage of people who received a gesture before ever being around someone actually using the gesture