Feldon ArsTechnica.com is reporting that 60 Terabytes of Raw Server Logs from the EverQuest II universe captured over the last 4 years have been provided to a collaborative group of academic researchers — including psychologists to epidemiologists — at a number of institutions.
Dmitri Williams introduced the project and described how researchers have been approaching various game developers over the years. He paraphrased the conversation with Sony as:
“What do you collect?”
“Well, everything—what do you want?”
“Can we have it all?”
“Sure.”
The end result is a log that includes four years of data for over 400,000 players that took part in the game, which was followed up with demographic surveys of the users.
The team can now track how individual customers dropping out of the game influenced others who they typically played or interacted with.
Gender turned out to be a negative influence on interactions: even after their low numbers were taken into account, female players avoided interacting with each other. Older women turned out to be some of the most committed players but significantly under-reported the amount of time they spent in the game by three hours per week
Time zones had some influence; players in the same time zone were 1.25 times more likely to partner than players even one time zone apart. But distance had a much larger effect; players within 10 kilometers of each other were five times more likely to interact.
For the most part, the companies that the researchers have approached either haven’t been interested in sharing their logs or the logs themselves don’t contain the sort of data that would make for fruitful research.