Trends and Controversies

This issue includes two articles with additional research examples from distinguished experts in social science and computer science. In the first article, "Secondary Avatars and Semiautonomous Agents" presents semiautonomous agent assistants that have been incorporated into recent MMOGs. In the second article, a group of people constructed combat, mentoring, and trust networks based on data from Sony's popular MMOG Everquest II. They also provide an excellent summary of their ongoing research in performance and learning, player churn analysis, and identifying undesirable behavior in MMOGs. The authors argue that the close collaboration between social scientists and computer scientists is creating an emerging area called "computational social science," where computation is used as an integral mechanism in social science research.