Social Interactions in Virtual Worlds

Kiran Lakkaraju is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff in the Sandia National Laboratories Cognitive Science and Applications group, New Mexico. His primary research interests lie in computational models of behavior change in society and exploring links between social and cognitive structures in problems of information dissemination and attitude change. His current work revolves around developing online social experiments through the Controlled, large online social experimentation platform. Gita Sukthankar is Associate Professor and Charles N. Millican Faculty Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida (UCF), and an affiliate faculty member at UCF's Institute for Simulation and Training. Her research focuses on multiagent systems and computational social models. She received an Air Force Young Investigator award and an NSF CAREER award. She served on DARPA's Computer Science Study Panel and is currently a member of DARPA's Information Science and Technology study group and the board of directors of IFAAMAS. Rolf T. Wigand is Maulden-Entergy Chair and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Information Science and Business Information Systems at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is the past director of the Syracuse University Graduate Program in Information Management and their Center for Digital Commerce. His research focuses on software standards development and collective action in the mortgage, automotive, and RFID industries, development of trust and leadership in virtual organizations, the analysis of social networks in disaster situations, and novel methods for analysis and tracking of collective action on social media.

• Part I. Individual Behaviors and Dyadic Relationships: 1. VERUS John Murray, Thomas Chesney and Robert Hoffmann; 2. Understanding aggressive and non-aggressive individual behaviors in MMOGs Iftekhar Ahmed, Andrew Pilny and Marshall Scott Poole; 3. From good associates to true friends Fanny Anne Ramirez; 4. Couples who slay together, stay together Elizabeth Craig, Nicholas Taylor and Sarah Evans; Part II. Groups: 5. Virtual team communication norms John C. Sherblom, Lesley A. Withers, Lynette G. Leonard and Jeffrey S. Smith; 6. Toxic allies and caring friends Maude Bonenfant, Laura Iseut Lafrance St-Martin, Félix Prégent and Lucile Crémier; 7. Management (im)material Nick Taylor, Suzanne de Castell, Jennifer Jenson and Ryan Hurley; 8. Virtual organization and online games Rolf T. Wigand; 9. Virtual economic experiments Thomas Chesney, Swee Hoon Chuah, Robert Hoffmann, Wendy Hui and Jeremy Larner; Part III. Understanding Culture with Games: 10. A simulated utopia William Sims Bainbridge; 11. Gaming in multicultural classrooms Amanda Paz Alencar and Teresa de la Hera Conde-Pumpido; Part IV. Techniques for Analyzing Game Data: 12. The power of social features in online gaming Fernando Kuipers, Marcus Martens, Ernst van der Hoeven and Alexandru Iosup; 13. Profiling in games Rafet Sifa, Anders Drachen and Christian Bauckhage; 14. Using massively multiplayer online game data to analyze the dynamics of social interactions Alireza Hajibagheri, Gita Sukthankar, Kiran Lakkaraju, Hamidreza Alvari, Rolf T. Wigand and Nitin Agarwal.

'While social platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Twitter have a much broader reach, the uniqueness of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and virtual worlds is that the participation in them is deep. Driven by various motivations, including achievement, socialization and immersion, participants can spend multiple hours a day on such platforms - deriving experiential benefits that are far beyond superficial, and often satisfying at a far deeper level. From a social science perspective, this provides a unique opportunity to extend and refine social science theories in a far more nuanced manner than before, and use them to build models for various applications. The key to this has been the availability of fine grained data about behavior, the 'big data of social science', as well as the development of a new social science research methodology which is based on computer science techniques like machine learning and social network analysis. We are witnessing the start of a new era in social science research, and this book is a timely collection of some of the best work in this rapidly expanding area of inquiry.' Jaideep Srivastava, University of Minnesota