A Study of Gamer Experience and Virtual World Behaviour

Abstract

This paper reports a study which examined the impact of computer game experience on behaviour observed inside a virtual world. A social networking world was used, which was owned and run by the research team and a dataset capturing the behaviour of 195 subjects was extracted from the world's event logs. Four broad areas were analysed: communication, movement, avatar creation and world customization. Highly significant differences were found in text communication. Less significant differences were found in movement and avatar creation, and none were found in the customization of the world.