Ang, Zaphiris - 2009 - Simulating Social Networks of Online Communities Simulation as a Method for S

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Simulating Social Networks of Online Communities: Simulation as a Method for Sociability Design Chee Siang Ang1 and Panayiotis Zaphiris2 1

Centre for HCI Design, City University London jimmybbq@gmail.com 2 Department of Multimedia and Graphics Art, Cyprus University of Technology

Abstract. We propose the use of social simulations to study and support the design of online communities. In this paper, we developed an Agent-Based Model (ABM) to simulate and study the formation of social networks in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) guild community. We first analyzed the activities and the social network (who-interacts-with-whom) of an existing guild community to identify its interaction patterns and characteristics. Then, based on the empirical results, we derived and formalized the interaction rules, which were implemented in our simulation. Using the simulation, we reproduced the observed social network of the guild community as a means of validation. The simulation was then used to examine how various parameters of the community (e.g. the level of activity, the number of neighbors of each agent, etc) could potentially influence the characteristic of the social networks. Keywords: Agent-based model, online community, simulation, sociability, social network.

1 Introduction Developing online communities involves usability design, which supports consistent, controllable and predictable Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), as well as sociability design, which focuses on human-human interaction (i.e. social interaction) and social policies [24]. The majority of research on sociability design has so far been revolved around conventional HCI methods such as query-based techniques (e.g. questionnaires, interviews), observation and content analysis to identify sociability requirements of online communities. For instance, using these methods, several studies have already analyzed the content of messages that people post in online communities [26, 13, 11, 4, 27, 25, 14, 22]. When developing online communities, we believe that it is useful to be able to evaluate and compare design alternatives. For instance, how different social policies could potentially lead to the expansion of the community; how specific interface design elements could sustain the growth of the online social networks. We might also want to find out how certain changes in an existing community could affect its future development. One possible way of sociability design evaluation and comparison is through simulations. Suppose we have an online game community and we notice that there are a lot T. Gross et al. (Eds.): INTERACT 2009, Part II, LNCS 5727, pp. 443–456, 2009. Š IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009


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