Abstract
Cooperation and competition are important subjects in social and economical studies. Similar dynamics exists in large-scale online communities. In this paper, we present a quantitative study on the cooperation and competition dynamics of an online gaming community. During a period of four months, we collected a total of over one million data points in an open game room with an online gaming site (www.ourgame.com.cn) for a popular card game “upgrade”. The “upgrade” game room provided us an excellent environment to observe how cooperative and competitive relationships are formed in an online community. Through the statistical analysis, we obtain the probability for players with different score tags forming cooperative and competitive relationships with each other. Our analysis shows that all players exhibit preferential bias in their partner selection process, but shows little bias in their selection of competitors. Further, the cooperation bias is the strongest in both the low score and high score ends of the player population. We also discuss the effect of such preferential bias on the population distributions in the game community. To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale quantitative study on the cooperation dynamics in online gaming community. The online game community environment offers us a great proxy to study the same dynamics that is difficult to investigate in the real world social environment. The large, statistically significant amount of data enables us to develop and test many hypotheses.
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Yuan, R., Zhao, L., Wang, W. (2007). Cooperation and Competition Dynamics in an Online Game Community. In: Schuler, D. (eds) Online Communities and Social Computing. OCSC 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4564. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73257-0_52
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73257-0_52
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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