EverQuest II Behavior Data Analyzed

From the “privacy is overrated” department comes word that Sony Online Entertainment has handed over 60 terabytes worth of EverQuest II player behavior data to researchers at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In addition to introducing the EQ2 logs as a resource, Dmitri Williams described some of the efforts involved in exploring how much of the real world spilled over into the virtual.

The average age of players turned out to be 31. “These aren’t just pasty white teenage boys in a basement to be sure, they’re there, but they’re not typical,” he said. The older players tended to play more than the kids and, although the total hours played seem large, he said that the time mostly displaced either TV watching or movie going. And the surveys showed that those who viewed TV news in the first place continued to do so, suggesting that gamers really slotted EQ2 into their entertainment time.

Mostly, the gamers seemed healthy; their body mass index was better than the US average and, although they were slightly more depressed than average, they were also less anxious.

Buried among those happy, average players was a small subset of the population about five percent who used the game for serious role playing and, according to Williams, “They are psychologically much worse off than the regular players.” They belong to marginalized groups, like ethnic and religious minorities and non-heterosexuals, and tended to use the game as a coping mechanism.

Now that they have hundreds of thousands of names and addresses, the scientists’ next plan of attack is to tranquilize a small percentage of the EQ2 population and “escort” them to a laboratory where they can be better analyzed. All in the name of science, of course.