The social side of gaming: a study of interaction patterns in a massively multiplayer online game
CSCW '04 Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Character play: the use of game characters in multi-player role-playing games across platforms
Computers in Entertainment (CIE) - Theoretical and Practical Computer Applications in Entertainment
Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality
Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality
Problematic Internet use and psychosocial well-being among MMO players
Computers in Human Behavior
Power-Law Distributions in Empirical Data
SIAM Review
Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds
Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds
Convex Non-negative Matrix Factorization in the Wild
ICDM '09 Proceedings of the 2009 Ninth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining
Player modeling using self-organization in tomb raider: underworld
CIG'09 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Computational Intelligence and Games
Cross-modal compensation between name and visual aspect in socially active avatars
Computers in Human Behavior
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The abstract should summarize the contents of the paper and should People are increasingly interacting via online services - from forums, online communities, social networks and online computer games. While there has been considerable research on the motivations and communication of people online, as well as the social environment provided by online services, large-scale analyses of the virtual identities people use online are rare. In this paper, the first large-scale analysis of virtual identities in the massively multi-player online game WORLD OF WARCRAFT® is presented based on a dataset of nearly eight million avatar names and associated information. The results presented highlight the inventiveness of the names the users of WORLD OF WARCRAFT® express in terms of naming their virtual identities and the varied nature of the sources of inspiration for these names, which range from mythology, literature, popular culture, real-world names and others. The results also indicate that how players name their characters is influenced by the aesthetics and game function of the characters. The server type also appears to have an impact on player naming strategies, with role-playing servers forming a distinct cluster from Player-vs-Player type servers. Additionally, the analysis presented reveals that character name frequencies follow, similar to real-world names, a power law distribution.