Gamers' Behaviour and Communication Analysis in Massively Multiplayer Online Games: A Survey

Recent studies on social computing such as massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs), have attracted the attention of many researchers in the world. This emerging field has been developed in close collaboration between social and computer scientists. In this area of science, “computation” is used as a mechanism for conducting the “social science” researches. Due to the increasing growth of MMOGs both in terms of economic activities and social interactions, the necessity of focusing on social computing in digital games industry is apparent. The MMOGs provide mechanisms to extend social activities among gamers such as creation and formation of groups, tribes, clans, corporations, etc. Data collected from the MMOGs provides an excellent insight in order to study the gamers' social behavior. This article is the first survey on the study of the gamers' behavior using Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches and other relevant interdisciplinary methods. In this paper, at first, we highlight the importance of studying the behavior of users of MMOGs, and then, we categorize the former studies into five broad classes including: “gamer modeling”, “gamer experience modeling”, “gamer incentive modeling”, “social relationship analysis”, and “human gamer behavior and automated agents (bots) detection”. We also draw the trends of future researches in this area.