Online-offline activities and game-playing behaviors of avatars in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game

¹  School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology - Shanghai 200237, PRC
²  School of Science, East China University of Science and Technology - Shanghai 200237, PRC
³  Research Center for Econophysics, East China University of Science and Technology - Shanghai 200237, PRC
⁴  Research Center on Fictitious Economics and Data Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences - Beijing 100190, PRC
⁵  Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd - Shanghai 201203, PRC

Corresponding author: wxzhou@ecust.edu.cn

Received: 29 July 2009
Accepted: 3 November 2009

Abstract

Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are very popular in China, which provides a potential platform for scientific research. We study the online-offline activities of avatars in an MMORPG to understand their game-playing behavior. The statistical analysis unveils that the active avatars can be classified into three types. The avatars of the first type are owned by game cheaters who go online and offline in preset time intervals with the online duration distributions dominated by pulses. The second type of avatars is characterized by a Weibull distribution in the online durations, which is confirmed by statistical tests. The distributions of online durations of the remaining individual avatars differ from the above two types and cannot be described by a simple form. These findings have potential applications in the game industry.