Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty
Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Bilateral Trade and `Small-World' Networks
Computational Economics
Simulation for the Social Scientist
Simulation for the Social Scientist
Expertise networks in online communities: structure and algorithms
Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
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We propose the use of social simulations to study and support the design of online communities. In this paper, we developed an Agent-Based Model (ABM) to simulate and study the formation of social networks in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) guild community. We first analyzed the activities and the social network (who-interacts-with-whom) of an existing guild community to identify its interaction patterns and characteristics. Then, based on the empirical results, we derived and formalized the interaction rules, which were implemented in our simulation. Using the simulation, we reproduced the observed social network of the guild community as a means of validation. The simulation was then used to examine how various parameters of the community (e.g. the level of activity, the number of neighbors of each agent, etc) could potentially influence the characteristic of the social networks.