文献类型：期刊文献

英文题名：Online-offline activities and game-playing behaviors of avatars in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game

作者：Jiang, Zhi-Qiang[1,2,3];Zhou, Wei-Xing[1,2,3,4];Tan, Qun-Zhao[5]

机构：[1]E China Univ Sci & Technol, Sch Business, Shanghai 200237, Peoples R China;[2]E China Univ Sci & Technol, Sch Sci, Shanghai 200237, Peoples R China;[3]E China Univ Sci & Technol, Res Ctr Econophys, Shanghai 200237, Peoples R China;[4]Chinese Acad Sci, Res Ctr Fictitious Econ & Data Sci, Beijing 100190, Peoples R China;[5]Shanda Interact Entertainment Ltd, Shanghai 201203, Peoples R China

年份：2009

卷号：88

期号：4

外文期刊名：EPL

收录：;WOS:【SSCI(收录号:WOS:000272835000032)，SCI-EXPANDED(收录号:WOS:000272835000032)】；

基金：This work was partly supported by the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (Grant No. NCET-07-0288).

语种：英文

摘要：Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are very popular in China, which provides a potential platform for scientific research. We study the online-offline activities of avatars in an MMORPG to understand their game-playing behavior. The statistical analysis unveils that the active avatars can be classified into three types. The avatars of the first type are owned by game cheaters who go online and offline in preset time intervals with the online duration distributions dominated by pulses. The second type of avatars is characterized by a Weibull distribution in the online durations, which is confirmed by statistical tests. The distributions of online durations of the remaining individual avatars differ from the above two types and cannot be described by a simple form. These findings have potential applications in the game industry. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2009