RoleSeer: Understanding Informal Social Role Changes in MMORPGs via Visual Analytics

TL;DR

RoleSeer is a visual analytics tool designed to identify and analyze informal social roles and their dynamic changes in MMORPGs, aiding understanding of player behaviors and social interactions.

Contribution

This paper introduces RoleSeer, a novel visual analytics system for exploring and interpreting informal social roles and their evolution in online gaming communities.

Findings

RoleSeer effectively visualizes informal role transitions.

Experts and users find RoleSeer helpful for role interpretation.

The system reveals subtle behavioral patterns behind role changes.

Abstract

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games create virtual communities that support heterogeneous "social roles" determined by gameplay interaction behaviors under a specific social context. For all social roles, formal roles are pre-defined, obvious, and explicitly ascribed to the people holding the roles, whereas informal roles are not well-defined and unspoken. Identifying the informal roles and understanding their subtle changes are critical to designing sociability mechanisms. However, it is nontrivial to understand the existence and evolution of such roles due to their loosely defined, interconvertible, and dynamic characteristics. We propose a visual analytics system, RoleSeer, to investigate informal roles from the perspectives of behavioral interactions and depict their dynamic interconversions and transitions. Two cases, experts' feedback, and a user study suggest that RoleSeer helps interpret the identified informal roles and explore the patterns behind role changes. We see our approach's potential in investigating informal roles in a broader range of social games.