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Analysis of Social Networks in a Virtual World Gregory Thomas Stafford University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

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Analysis of Social Networks in a Virtual World Gregory Thomas Stafford University of Arkansas, Fayetteville University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ScholarWorks@UARK Theses and Dissertations 12-2013 Analysis of Social Networks in a Virtual World Gregory Thomas Stafford University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd Part of the Digital Communications and Networking Commons Recommended Citation Stafford, Gregory Thomas, "Analysis of Social Networks in a Virtual World" (2013). Theses and Dissertations. 925. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/925 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Analysis of Social Networks in a Virtual World Analysis of Social Networks in a Virtual World A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science by Gregory Thomas Stafford University of Arkansas Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, 2010 December 2013 University of Arkansas This thesis is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council. ___________________________________ Dr. Susan Gauch Thesis Director ___________________________________ ___________________________________ Dr. John Gauch Dr. Craig Thompson Committee Member Committee Member ABSTRACT As three-dimensional virtual environments become both more prevalent and more fragmented, studying how users are connected via their avatars and how they benefit from the virtual world community has become a significant area of research. An in-depth analysis of virtual world social networks is needed to evaluate how users interact in virtual worlds, to better understand the impact of avatar social networks on the virtual worlds, and to improve future online social networks. Our current efforts are focused on building and exploring the social network aspects of virtual worlds. In this thesis, we build a social network of avatars based on their interaction in the Second Life virtual world and compare it to other social networking sites found on the web. Experimental results with data crawled from Second Life virtual worlds demonstrate that our approach was able to build a representative network of avatars in a virtual world from the sample data. The analysis comparison between virtual world social networks and others in the flat web allows us to gauge measures that better explore the relationship between locations linked by multiple users and their avatars. Using this comparison, we can also determine if techniques of personalized search and content recommendation are feasible for virtual world environments. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my family for their support and encouragement throughout my studies at the University of Arkansas as well as their understanding while I spent a majority of my time on this project. Additionally I would like to thank Dr. Susan Gauch for the opportunity to work with her during this project and her guidance throughout my graduate education. I also thank my thesis committee, Dr. John Gauch and Dr. Craig Thompson, for reviewing my thesis. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Background .......................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Motivation ............................................................................................................................. 3 1.2.1 Avatars ........................................................................................................................... 3 1.2.2 Groups ............................................................................................................................ 4 1.2.3 Link Definition............................................................................................................... 4 1.2.4 Why Study Virtual World Social Networks?................................................................. 5 1.3 Organization of this Thesis .................................................................................................. 7 2. RELATED WORK ................................................................................................................... 8 2.1 Virtual Worlds ...................................................................................................................... 8 2.1.1 Impact of Virtual Worlds ............................................................................................... 8 2.1.2. Behavioral Effects ....................................................................................................... 10 2.1.3 Architectures ................................................................................................................ 12 2.1.4 Crawling ....................................................................................................................... 14 2.2 Social Networks .................................................................................................................. 15 2.2.1 User Activity ................................................................................................................ 16 2.2.2 Other Link Definitions ................................................................................................. 17 2.3 Social Network Analysis..................................................................................................... 18 2.3.1 Online Social Networks ............................................................................................... 19 2.3.2 Effect of Link Definition on Analysis ......................................................................... 21 2.3.3 Sampling Techniques ................................................................................................... 23 3. APPROACH ............................................................................................................................ 25 3.1 Crawler for a Virtual World ................................................................................................ 25 3.1.1 Architecture...................................................................................................................... 26 3.1.2 Movement and Navigation ........................................................................................... 27 3.1.3 Server Controllers ........................................................................................................ 28 3.1.4 Storage ......................................................................................................................... 28 3.2 Social Network Analysis..................................................................................................... 29 3.2.1 Methods Selected ......................................................................................................... 30 3.2.2 Implementation of Analysis ......................................................................................... 31 3.2.3 Software Developed ..................................................................................................... 34 4. EVALUATION ....................................................................................................................... 36 4.1 Data Collection ................................................................................................................... 36 4.2 Experiments ........................................................................................................................ 36 4.3 Evaluation of Social Networks ........................................................................................... 38 4.4 Joint Degree Distribution .................................................................................................... 41 4.5 k-Nearest Neighbor Distributions ....................................................................................... 43 4.6 Discussion ........................................................................................................................... 44 5. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 45 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................ 47 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background Virtual world environments allow users to navigate through and interact with online content in a 3D space using avatars as virtual representations. According to Virtual Worlds Review1, virtual worlds such as Second Life, Open Simulator, and Active Worlds, are growing both in popularity and in number. In the last ten years, they have received significant attention from the public at large, from businesses and other organizations, and from scholars in disciplines as diverse as law, sociology, psychology, math, and, more recently, information systems [1]. Providing users with an easy way to locate online content quickly and efficiently has been a large area of interest. Several social networking web sites on ‘The Flat Web’ including Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut and YouTube collect user information, user preferences, and online activities to better predict what web content will be of interest to users in the future. Virtual world environments have the same need to quickly
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